Weekly(-ish) Notes: August 11–August 19, 2025: Worldcon Edition

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?

Me in front of a big screen showing the Seattle Worldcon logo.
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.

Selfie of my wife and I standing in front of three suitcases and a couple smaller bags in our caport as we wait for our Lyft.
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).

A wide-angle shot of downtown Seattle as seen from our hotel room.
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).

Me setting up an aluminum tripod easel in a huge convention center room; next to me is a wheeled pushcart stacked about three feet high with cardboard wrapped bundles.
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!
Me in the midst of setup, with a pile of posters at my feet, and a couple visible easels with posters at the top and leaning against the legs.
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.
A display of book cover art posters displayed on easels and on the floor leaned against the easels, arranged so that people can walk through to view everything on display.
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.

Me in front of Climate Pledge Area, with a growing crowd of goths behind me waiting outside the doors. I'm wearing an old, faded shirt with a worn but still mostly visible photo collage of Reznor industrial heaters.
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.

The arena filled with people, with the stage at the left of the image, as the band plays behind fabric screens with live images of the band being projected onto them.
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.

The arena with the stage on the left, this time with everything bathed in magenda and purple light.
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.

The arena dark at the end of the show, save for the NIN logo projected on the screens around a black stage.
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 exhibit, with a display case filled with memorabilia, a wall with printed reproductions of paper ephemera, and a table with more memorabilia and prints.
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!

A display case with a photo of Poul Anderson receving his first Hugo for 'The Longest Voyage', the issue of Amazing Stories with that story, his Hugo award trophy, and a copy of A Canticle for Liebowitz, the Best Novle Hugo winner for that year.
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!

Me standing at a table behind an Apple MacBook on a stand and an iPad, and in front of a large video screen with fancy-looking graphics being displayed.
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.

A small crowd of about 20 people on the dance floor, lit in blues and magentas.
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.

The stage for The Head That Woudln't Die, mostly an empty stage lit in green with a video wall in the background, and more video walls to either side of the stage.
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!

My wife and I at the dance, me in a long black frock coat over white shirt and bow tie, her in a green flapper dress, both of us wearing lacy masks.
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.

Selfie of me and Cyan, both with big grins.
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.

Layered silhouettes of two people talking, in dark pink and green against a light pink lit wall.
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. :)

The big thing for me on Saturday afternoon was my presentation: Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions.

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.

Me sitting at a table behind my computer, in front of a large screen displaying a slide with the title 'Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions' and live captions at the bottom of the screen showing me testing the captioning.
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!

Me standing behind the table, with my final 'thank you' slide visible on the screen, chatting with four of the attendees.
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.

My wife and I in line; she's in a nice long black dress with frilly hem, I'm in a black formal kilt, white shirt, black tux jacket, and bow tie.
We looked great!
Six people in fancy dress, lined up and smiling.
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.

Wide shot of the Hugo award ceremony stage, lit in blues and with blue and orange curtains to the sides, with large video screens to the far left and right showing a slide that says Welcome to the Hugo Awards.
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.

Six people in various forms of fancy dress on stage, some holding booklets as they sing.
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. :)

Me and Taylor, who is dressed in black boots, white suit, and red vest, on the dance floor.
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.

Me with three other people at a table covered with computers, paper, sticky notes, and various other evidence of a busy workspace.
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.

Me laughing as I sign my article as Mary looks on.
This means I’m a famous author now, right?

After that, we went off so I could be a panelist on the Norwescon: Local but Not Little panel.

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

Four people sitting behind a grey table, all lined up for our panel.
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.

Wide shot of the panel, with the panelists on the left and a large video screen showing the Norwescon history website on the right.
This gave me a great opportunity to introduce the Norwescon online archives to more people.

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 four of us at the table on the left, as the screen on the right displays art of a troll under a bridge.
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.

A line of seventeen people on the Worldcon main stage.
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.

Me leaning over next to a table with foam-core mouned posters stacked around and on top of it, some covered with cardboard sheets.
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).

More stacks of posters around the table as I straighten one stack before taping it together.
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.

Oh, and I definitely got my steps in….

Screenshot of the Apple Health app's trends screen, showing my daily averages jumping from about 6,500 steps and 3 miles a day to almost 20,000 steps and 8.5 miles a day over the prior six days.

Friday was peak time: 25,664 steps, 12.11 miles, 24 flights climbed!

Other Thoughts, Memories, and Neat Things

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, with art by Donato Giancola of a craftsman carving a fancy wooden panel.
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.

An enamel pin with the Seattle Worldcon logo and the legend 'hero of the convention' at the bottom.
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.

My badge with a long string of 24 badge ribbons attached to it.
Not a bad collection of ribbons, especially given how much time I spent locked away in the publications office!

Bi-Weekly Notes: July 21–August 10, 2025

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

My hand putting a ballot into our mailbox.
I voted! I hope you did too!
A raccoon sitting in a tree on a college campus.
Saw a curious raccoon on campus early one morning.

📚 Reading

I finished Martha Wells’ Murderbot series with Network Effect and The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 3 (collecting Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse), followed that up with a bit of comic smut with Jonas Goonface’s The Ship of Unsinkable Fools, and then read my next TNG novel, Simon Hawke’s Blaze of Glory.

📺 Watching

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!

Weekly Notes: July 21–27, 2025

A less eventful week this week. I worked and met a friend at Dicks for a nice lunchtime chat on Thursday; my wife stayed home and concentrated on healing. Not a lot to report for this week, really.

📚 Reading

Continuing on my Murderbot binge, I read the first half of The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 3, then hopped over to read Network Effect, since it takes place between Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse, the two novellas collected in Vol. 3. I’m almost done with that (will likely finish it tonight), and then back to Vol. 3 to finish it off.

📺 Watching

One of my wife’s recovery binge shows has been The Tudors, which we finished on Saturday, and then followed that up with a double feature of Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Since we were then in a movie mood but wanted something a bit more modern, we watched Blast from the Past and Clueless for some ’90s comedies.

🎧 Listening

No new albums, but I have been getting some entertaining requests for the Worldcon dance that I’ve had to track down to add to my collection.

🔗 Linking

  • Daily HIG (@daily_hig on Mastodon): “Read a link to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines a day, keep your bugs away.” I’m not a programmer, but I followed this account just to enjoy the macOS geekery.

Weekly Notes: July 14–20, 2025

(Posting this one a couple days late and backdating it….)

  • ♿️ My wife’s healing has been going well, so this week I went back to heading into the office to work. Well…in theory. The Seattle area was having a bit of a heat wave (high 80s to mid 90s), which threw things off. Mondays I work from home, Tuesday I went in and the building was really warm, Wednesday I went in but we got sent home at noon because the A/C was out, Thursday we were told to work from home while they worked on the A/C, and we work on a 4-10s schedule during the summer, so I didn’t work on Friday. So my first week back in the office was a day and a half! My wife didn’t mind, though. :)

  • 🕺🏻 Saturday night a friend of my wife’s came over to spend the night so that I could have a night off from caretaking, so I got to head out to the Mercury for the first time in a couple months. It was a rather slow night (competing with the Capitol Hill Block Party and a Stabbing Westward concert), but picked up a bit towards midnight. No worries, though, as the music was good, and I got to hang out with a friend and chat about convention drama.

📸 Photos

A brown dragonfly with clear wings striped with brown, sitting on a fence post with blurry green leaves in the background.
This dragonfly was hunting gnats in our backyard as I was watering our flowers.
A heron sitting on a dead tree branch behind some wetlands grass with trees in the background.
We spotted a heron to the side of the trail as we were off taking my wife on her first walk outside of our neighborhood in several weeks.
Whoah-oh, Black Betty…
A grocery bin sign that says 'rambutan'.
A sticker that says 'trans witches for Palestine' stuck to a building on a Seattle street.
Seattle sticker graffiti doesn’t get much more Seattle than this.
A small collectible card storage box that looks like a classic Star Trek Gorn, sitting next to a small gnome holding a sign that says 'welcome' and standing near a small red door.
When we got home from our walk on Sunday morning, we discovered that the “Welcome gnome” outside our front door was being menaced by a Gorn! Sort of. A nice surprise gift from a friend!

📚 Reading

With Worldcon coming up in just a few weeks, I’m binging my way through the Murderbot series by our guest of honor Martha Wells. This week, I read The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 1 (collecting All Systems Red and Artificial Condition), Compulsory, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 2 (collecting Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy), and Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory.

📺 Watching

🖖🏻 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back with the first two episodes of season three! I enjoyed both episodes…but with reservations (which I posted behind a content warning on Mastodon to protect against spoilers).

🎧 Listening

Two new albums this week:

🔗 Linking

Fortnightly Notes: June 30–July 13, 2025

As there have been Things Going On lately, I missed last Sunday’s “Weekly Notes” post, so this becomes a “Fortnightly Notes” post instead, partly because “biweekly” is vague, and “fortnight” is a term should be used more often (outside of a gaming context).

  • 🏥 The major part of the Things Going On has been that two weeks ago, my wife had a (planned and necessary) hysterectomy, and I’ve been on caretaker duty. She had two nights in the hospital following the surgery, and then came home and has been recuperating here. She’s healing well, and had a good post-op checkup a few days ago, so things are going well! This does mean that our summer is going to be mostly uneventful, but that’s obviously quite okay under the circumstances.

  • ♿️ Due to the aforementioned Things Going On, I’ve spent the past two weeks working remotely. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job that lets me do that when it’s necessary, and I wish more people had the ability to do this.

  • 🚀 On the convention front, the Seattle Worldcon schedule was released this past week. Since I’m our website admin, I’m quite happy with the technical side of things, as I was able to present the full 5-day schedule on a single page, filterable by day, track, or both, and with clean (for WordPress), semantic, and accessible (to the best of my ability to verify) code.

    A bit of geekery:

    The Javascript code that does the filtering could quite probably be improved and optimized, as it’s just a result of me digging through the web and hacking things together until it did what I wanted, and my JavaScript knowledge is just barely at the level that allowed me to figure this out. But hey, it works, and that was the most important part.

    Each panel is wrapped in an article tag, each panel title is a heading, and start and end times are wrapped in proper time tags. Panel titles are linked self-anchors so that it’s easy to link directly to individual panels, which is discoverable either by tabbing to the title or by mousing over them. Here’s a sample of the code for one (totally randomly chosen) panel:

    <article class="track dan eve">
        <h4 id="EVE03"><a href="#EVE03">Wednesday Night Dance with DJ Wüdi</a></h4>
        <div class="sched">Events; Dance/Movement<br>Sheraton: Metropolitan Ballroom, <time datetime="2025-08-13T20:00-07:00">Wed. 8 p.m.</time>–<time datetime="2025-08-14T02:00-07:00">2 a.m.</time></div>
        <p class="desc">From dance clubs in Alaska in the '90s to being a recent regular DJ at Norwescon, DJ Wüdi spins an eclectic mix of dance tracks from across the decades. Pop, electronica/dance, wave, disco, goth/EBM/industrial, convention classics, mashups… (almost) anything goes! Already know there's something that'll get you out on the floor? <a href="https://app.limedj.com/shows/djwudi/9NWMHW">Send in your requests ahead of time!</a></p>
        <p class="pros">DJ Wüdi</p>
    </article>
    

    Keyboard navigation for the page works fine, checking it with WAVE comes up with zero errors (and 400-some “alerts”, but that’s because WAVE incorrectly thinks the panelist listings should be headers), checking with ANDI also looks good, and I was able to navigate and interact (at least as well as a non-regular screen reader user can) with VoiceOver and NVDA. This certainly doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that could be improved, but I’m pretty happy with where I got things to be.

📸 Photos

Me stretched out in a grey recliner in our living room.
Our old recliner broke, so we got a new one. Of course, once assembled, I had to give it a good test. It works! Which is good, since this is my wife’s primary recuperation spot.
Me sitting at a small table in a hospital room, wearing a face mask while working on my computer.
Working from a hospital room isn’t quite as comfortable as from home or at the office, but at least I could do it!

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Read Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids and issue 65 of Uncanny Magazine.

📺 Watching

I found time for four movies, mostly in the first few post-surgery days when my wife was doing a lot of sleeping:

  • The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother: ⭐️⭐️ — Not as amusing as I hoped, given the cast.
  • Bugsy Malone: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ – I’d had vague memories of kids shooting marshmallows out of tommy guns in a ’20s gangster film, and finally tracked down that memory. Odd, but entertaining!
  • Johnny Dangerously: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Another ’20s gangster parody I vaguely remembered watching as a kid; this one is still really funny, and I realized while watching it that some old jokes I’ve had in my head for years came from this film. “You shouldn’t grab me, Johnny. My mother grabbed me once. Once.
  • KPop Demon Hunters: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Somehow this one popped into conversations around me, I gave it a shot, and was entertained…and suspect that it would be a good idea to make sure the soundtrack ends up in my convention DJing playlist.

🔗 Linking

  • Patrick Clark in Businessweek: American Mid: Hampton Inn’s Good-Enough Formula for World Domination: I’ve occasionally wondered about how the mid-range hotel breakfast buffet got started; this was a surprisingly interesting look at how strategically aiming for the middle of the road made Hampton Inn the US’s largest hotel chain (which I wouldn’t have guessed).

  • Lynda V. Mapes in The Seattle Times: These orcas have been trying to feed people, new research shows: “So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people? ¶ Researchers ruled out play, because the incidents were short, lasting only about 30 seconds. And it’s mostly young orcas that play, and orcas of every age offered food. So it seems what is going on is exploration, the scientists surmised: The orcas are curious to see what happens if they offer us food.”

  • Gaurav Sood at Yanko Design: World’s Narrowest Fiat Panda is One Anorexic 19-Inch-Wide EV Destined for the Record Books: “Italian mechanic Andrea Marazzi has transformed a 1993 Fiat Panda into what is now being described as the world’s narrowest functioning car. At just 19.6 inches wide, the one-seater electric vehicle looks more like a cartoon sketch brought to life than a road-ready hatchback. Yet it can move, steer, stop, and drive like any other car.”

  • Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared: “Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. […] To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an “ongoing basis”….

  • Sitara at Sitara’s Garden: How Fantasy Fuelled 60s Counterculture: “That pirated Tolkien paperbacks hit like a bomb in 60s campuses. The bootleg copy was printed due to a loophole in copyright law and quickly became a cult phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in 1965 alone. The biggest fans of the book seemed to be hippies, protesters and rockstars. It makes sense when you look at the context.”

  • Laura Michet: Touching the back wall of the Apple store: “When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”

  • Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong at The Verge: The American system of democracy has crashed: “The declaration pronounces these rights to be so important that it’s worth overthrowing a government over them. But one should not undertake revolution against a tyrannical government lightly, the declaration says, going on to provide a massive litany of complaints as justification. In modern times, the full list was considered to be the boring part of this document, lacking the vim and vigor of ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ and other such bars from the preamble. But this year, it’s become a… bracing read.”

  • Jason Kottke: There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy: “America’s democratic collapse has been coming for years, always just over the horizon. But when everything that happened during Trump’s first three months in office happened and (here’s the important part) shockingly little was done by the few groups (Congress, the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party, American corporations & other large institutions, media companies) who had the power to counter it, I knew it was over. And over in a way that is irreversible, for a good long while at least.”

  • Sarah Taber on Mastodon (as a nice chaser to Kottke’s link above): “Hello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don’t feel like there’s much to celebrate this July 4th. It’s been a rough several years. ¶ So I want to talk about how we’re making history right now.”

  • Marcus Medford-Kerr at CBC Radio: These sea spiders use the bacteria on their bodies to turn methane into food: “Most sea spiders are hunters. They tend to eat anemones, worms, sponges and soft corals, getting their nutrients by piercing their prey and sucking up their internal fluids. ¶ The Sericosura spiders, on the other hand, are more like intergenerational farmers.”

  • Catherynne M. Valente in Uncanny Magazine Issue 65: When He Calls Your Name: So good, and a wonderful homage to…well, that would just be giving it away, wouldn’t it?

  • Dr David Musgrove at History Extra: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry and I have no regrets”: what one Oxford professor found when he studied the rudest bits of the embroidery: “It’s not too often that medieval historians grab national headlines, but when you get an Oxford academic counting penises in a world-famous embroidery, you’re sure to arouse media attention.”

  • Randee Dawn: 7.07.25 Why most SFF cons need fixing, and how CONvergence can show the way: I’m actually pleased to see that Norwescon is already doing or working on several of the suggestions in this post. That said, there’s more we can do to ensure that we’re around for our 50th year (not too far away!) and beyond.

  • Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQNation: GOP erases all mentions of bisexuals from Stonewall Monument webpages: “Transgender journalist Erin Reed noted that the Stonewall National Monument page once said, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.’ The newly revised version says, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal.'”

  • Marcin Wichary: Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004: “Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.”

Weekly Notes: June 23–29, 2025

  • ♿️ Summer quarter has begun, so work has slowed down a little bit, but that means it’s time to get caught up on the stuff that got pushed back during the run-up to commencement. Should be able to get a fair amount of progress on various projects over the coming weeks.

  • 🚀 I got my draft schedule for Worldcon this week. I’ll be giving a presentation on digital accessibility for conventions, plus participating on two panels; one on the future of education technology, and one on the history of Norwescon. Looking forward to all of them!

🔗 Linking

  • Christopher Bonanos in Curbed: Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Logo Looked Nothing Like a Campaign Logo: “Nobody would credit Zohran Mamdani’s campaign graphics for his win, but they were, as was his campaign, like nothing else in politics. […] What a Mamdani graphic doesn’t look like, particularly, is a standard campaign logo.”

  • Louie Mantia: Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses: “In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.”

  • Emma Roth at The Verge: The BBC is launching a paywall in the US: “The BBC wants to make people in the US pay for its content. The public broadcaster announced on Thursday that it will start offering US-based users an $8.99 per month (or $49.99 per year) subscription for “unlimited” access to news stories, feature reports, and the BBC News channel livestream.”

  • Luke Winkie at Slate: Zohran Mamdani Cracked a Code That’s Long Baffled Democrats: “The Democratic nominee for NYC mayor displayed a rare combination of his own moral clarity and a willingness to engage with a specific strain of internet leftism.”

  • Carsten Frauenheim at IFixIt: Torx Plus: The High-Tech Screw Hiding in Our Gadgets: “It’s hard to keep track of all the different types of screws, fasteners, bolts, bits, and bobs that hold our lives together, from our fridges and phones to cars and planes. If you’ve ever poked around inside a gadget, you’ve probably come face-to-face with a 6-lobed, star-shaped screw. ¶ That’s Torx. It and its new, high-tech cousin, Torx Plus, are the current kings of the screw hill. But what are they, and what makes them so special?”

Weekly Notes: June 16–22, 2025

This is actually a week-plus-one-day, because…

  • 🚗 …we spent most of this past week traveling to visit family. We drove down to Portland and visited our respective families in the area, my wife with her mom and sister and niblings, and me, joined by my brother who flew out from the east coast, visiting with our mom. Had some good and necessary discussions with mom, and it was nice to be able to have both of us there visiting her at the same time. And since we drove back home today, it didn’t really make sense to back-date this post by a day just to keep it as a Sunday evening thing.

📸 Photos

Black and white image of a gravestone that just says Batman.
My wife’s mom lives near a cemetery, and it’s a nice place to go for walks. This gravestone makes me laugh every time. I took a few more shots to play with.

Black and white photo of a gravestone from 1909 next to a tree.

A stone mausoleum next to rows of old gravestones with trees in the background.

Two women seen from behind walking along a path through a cemeter on a sunny day.
My wife and her mother walking through the cemetery.

A light brown coyote lying in grass with its nose tucked under its forepaw.
There are a couple local coyotes that regularly run along a path behind my mom’s apartment; this one decided to take an afternoon nap not far outside mom’s window.

My wife, me, and my brother, all crouched on either side of my mom in her motorized chair in front of a human-made lake.
My wife, me, and my brother with mom after dinner on the last night of our visit.

📚 Reading

Finished a Star Trek novel, Dafydd ab Hugh’s Balance of Power, and started Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Pyramids.

🔗 Linking

Weekly Notes: June 9–15, 2025

  • 🎓 This week was commencement week for Highline College! This year, for the first time, we held commencement at the Emerald Downs horse racing facility, and while there were the occasional minor hiccups you might expect with any first-time venue experience, overall, I think it went really well. Hopefully the post-commencement feedback we get is generally in agreement, because I liked this much better than using the local stadium. (Still not as nice as on-campus, but that presents its own set of logistical headaches.)
  • 🇺🇸 Saturday was the No Kings protest, and from my perspective and all the reports I’ve seen since, it went really well, both locally and nationally. Upwards of 70,000 participants in the Seattle Capitol Hill rally and march to the Seattle Center that we went to, with no agitators, no property damage, and virtually nonexistent police presence (I didn’t see any until just before the march reached the Seattle Center, when there were four in regular day wear casually chatting with people walking by, and just as we were leaving, we did see a group of 10 or so bike cops staged in a side street). It felt good. And we need to keep doing this.

📸 Photos

Wide panoramic shot of the Seattle Center's International Fountain crowded with post-march protesters, with the Space Needle in the background under a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.
People relaxing at the Seattle Center at the conclusion of the march.
Seen from behind, a marcher holds up a large piece of cardboard with the IKEA logo.
It always amuses me when people only decorate one side of their cardboard, because it looks like they’re somewhat confused about their messaging.
A marcher in a crowd holding up a sign that says, "hot girls hate fascists".
This one, seen at the start of the march, made me laugh.
Wide shot of a lot of people wearing graduation robes and caps standing on paths between green hedges.
Students, staff, and faculty, lining up for the commencement processional.
An AV control room with three people watching lots of banks of monitors, most of which are showing an image of a graduation speaker at a podium with captions at the bottom of the image.
Since I’m part of the behind-the-scenes tech team (specifically for me, making sure captioning works properly), this was my view of the ceremony. Not a bad way to do it at all!
An AV control board with lots of banks of brightly colored and lit buttons, with a silver t-shaped control lever that looks suspiciously like the one used during the Death Star's firing sequence….
Unfortunately, since all of this equipment was actually in use, I couldn’t actually pretend I was firing the Death Star. (The shot of the Death Star weapon control lever being moved used a [Grass Valley 1600 video switcher](https://vizreef.tumblr.com/post/684661437770186752/grass-valley-1600-4p1l-broadcast-video-control), specifically, one from [KCET, Los Angeles’s PBS station](https://www.pbssocal.org/tv-talk/how-kcet-helped-destroy-alderaan).)

📚 Reading

Read Clarkesworld Issue 225 and the first issue of Heavy Metal magazine’s relaunch.

🔗 Linking

  • Sheena Goodyear at CBC Radio: Every year, folks travel from far and wide watch this giant pencil get sharpened: “Once a year, the massive piece of pop art becomes an interactive community art installation. Hundreds — or sometimes even thousands — of people make their way to Higgins’ house in Minneapolis to watch the giant pencil get sharpened with a giant pencil sharpener.”
  • Jack Tamisiea at Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia: “Every cockatoo exhibited slight variations in its plan of attack. But the general strategy was the same: Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up. As the parrots slurped water from the bubbling spout, their sharp beaks often left behind chew marks on the fountain’s rubber top.”
  • RSSRSSRSSRSS: Combine multiple RSS feeds into one unified feed.
  • Nikki Mccann Ramirez, Naomi Lachance, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez, and Stephen Rodrick at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Birthday Parade Was A Gross Failure: “An aerial parade of historic military aircraft flew above the National Mall, traversing a course from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial that — despite clear anticipation of crowds by event organizers — was more empty field and food truck line than crowd.”
  • Doug Landry on X (but this is a ThreadReader link): I just got back from the Trump parade and I have to say it was legitimately the worst executed mass attendance event I’ve ever seen. The full thread is worth reading for some seriously good schadenfreude.
  • Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes at Cornell University: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task: “While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.”

Weekly Notes: June 2–8, 2025

  • ♿️🇺🇸 Work this week was something of a study in contrasts, whipsawing between celebrating our students at end-of-the-year celebrations and preparing for commencement, and getting news of two major attacks on disability rights and accessibility:
    • The American Council on Education has sent a letter (PDF link) to the Office of Management and Budget asking that implementation of last year’s Title II updates be delayed. The reasoning is the usual “but it’s too hard/expensive” whining from people who don’t want to do even the bare minimum of work to support disabled communities; the surprise is who the letter is coming from and being signed by. This has prompted a lot of uproar in the higher education accessibility communities, and we’re just getting started.

    • The Department of Energy is trying to fast-track rolling back the regulations that require new construction to be made accessible. This would be a huge blow to accessibility, and because of how they’re doing this, comments can only be submitted until June 16 (next Monday).

  • 🤓 On Saturday, we went down to the Kent Nerd Party, something of a local mini-convention in the historic downtown area. We were only there for a little over an hour (it being the first day of a two-day spring heatwave, with temperatures in the mid- to high-80s), but it was fun to see costumes, geek-centric street booths, a small Lego museum with some really impressive creations, and a few friends that we happened to run into.

📸 Photos

24 small Lego dioramas featuring well-known artists and their work, with cards below explaining which artist each diorama represents.
Seen at the Lego display at the Kent Nerd Party. My wife and I could identify most of these little artist dioramas without needing to reference the clue cards beneath.
A large size Lego person sitting in a lawn chair next to a plant with another figure emerging from it, both next to a poster for the classic sci-fi horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I really appreciated this nod to classic sci-fi horror. Figured it out before I noticed the poster to the side!
Small inclusive, bi, and trans pride flags displayed in the grass by a paved walkway.
Nice to see Pride flags set out across campus.
A metal tray with nine snacks made up of stacked lettuce, meat patty, tomato slice, and pickle…and nothing else.
There’s an old Bloom County comic where Milo goes into a Burger King and orders a Whopper, “hold the bun”. So I was _very_ amused to see a tray of burgers, sans bun, among the food options at a catered event on campus this week. For somewhere around four decades, I’d only ever known this as a comic strip gag, but apparently it’s a real thing?

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • S. Baum at Erin in the Morning: Defying DeSantis, Florida Pride Marchers Light Up Jacksonville Bridge with Rainbow Colors. It’s good to remember that as horrible as Florida the state is being right now, there are still a lot of people there that don’t agree with what their local government is doing, and are willing to make that known.

  • John Scalzi: Well, CAN You Prove You’re a US Citizen?: “How many US citizens could, in fact, prove that they are US citizens at the drop of the hat? Leave aside for the moment the absolutely correct argument that it should not be incumbent on any of us to do so, and focus on this particular question. Can you, directly and/or indirectly, show that you have citizenship here in the US?”

  • Amanda Guinzburg: Diabolus Ex Machina: “Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a ‘conversation’ I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent. ¶ What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.”

  • Nathalie Graham at Seattle Met: A Midsummer Nightmare: “According to performers and volunteers interviewed for this story, something is rotten in the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire: Poor labor conditions, bad actors, and business-over-people decisions by the board of directors are sapping the Renaissance faire of its magic.” Content warning: Contains reports of sexual and domestic abuse. Ammie, the first person interviewed in the article, is an acquaintance/friend from the Norwescon and SeaGoth communities, so I’d heard bits and pieces of her story over time; the other stories are new to me.

  • Sen. Patty Murray in the Seattle Times: Shut up and be quiet? No thanks: “Make yourself heard however you can. Maybe that’s a social media post or maybe it’s organizing thousands of parents to speak up for funding you care about. Big or small, it all makes a difference and it all adds up.”

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

  • ♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.

  • 🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.

  • 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

A rock group of seven teens and pre-teens performing on an outdoor stage as people watch.
The School of Rock kids performing; I think here they were doing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.
Social media post by Claire Willett saying, "for pride month this year can straight people focus less on 'love is love' and more on 'queer and trans people are in danger'".
A rainbow-colored unicorn with a skull face striding through a black and grey landsdape with flames at its hooves, trailing a banner that says, "we called off pride, now it's gay wrath month".

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

Finished Andor. That was really good. Easily among the best of the modern Star Wars shows and films (that I’ve seen, at least, not having seen them all).

🔗 Linking

  • Eric Wilkinson at King 5: AI stepping up as backup for short-staffed PenCom dispatchers (which was headlined “AI now takes some calls for help on Olympic Peninsula” when I bookmarked this): “AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person.” Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong…

  • Helen Smith at King 5: The Cascadia Subduction Zone looks a little different than researchers thought. Here’s what that means for ‘The Big One’ (which was headlined “New research reshapes ‘The Big One’ tsunami risk” when I bookmarked it…what’s with King 5 renaming headlines?): “New findings show that tsunami risk may be different, though not less, in places along the subduction zone. This is due to the absence of a ‘megasplay fault,’ which was previously believed to run from Vancouver Island down to the Oregon-California border.”

  • David Friedman at Ironic Sans: Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe: Fun interview with Star Trek fan and researcher Jörg Hillebrand.

  • Technology Connections on YouTube: Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind. Half an hour, but a fascinating look at how closed captions are encoded into analog video, how it works with the digital video of DVDs, and why modern players and Blu-ray disks are falling over with their closed caption support. Some of the basics here I knew from my subtitle projects, but a lot of the technical details were new to me and neat to learn about.

  • Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. (archive.is link): “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. ¶ It’s called a blue book.”

  • Nadira Goffe in Slate: The Controversy Surrounding Disney’s Remake of Lilo & Stitch, Explained: I don’t have any interest in watching the remake (big fan of the original, though), but as a non-Hawaiian white guy, reading about the political undertones in the original that have been stripped out of the remake was really interesting, as it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.

  • Anil Dash: The Internet of Consent: “The growing frustration around “enshittification” is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don’t respect our choices. We’re constantly wrestling with platforms that don’t respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don’t know about and certainly wouldn’t agree to if we did.”

  • Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty: “As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world.”

  • Chelsey Coombs at The Intercept: “Andor” Has a Message for the Left: Act Now: “‘Andor,’ the new series set in the universe, doubles down on its anti-authoritarian roots, focusing on the creation of the revolutionary Rebel Alliance. In the process, it gives us a glimpse into the messiness and conflict that often accompanies building a movement on the left, as activists fight over which political philosophies and strategies work best.”

  • Yona T. Sperling-Milner at The Harvard Crimson: Come At Me, Bro: “I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”

  • Suyi Davies Okungbowa: I Call Bullshit: Writing lessons from my toddler in the age of generative AI: “Software is as limited as the individuals, systems and institutions that define and prompt it, and as of today, mimicry is its highest form. But as you can see above, mimicry is not a significant endeavour. A human baby can mimic. A chameleon can mimic. Mimicry is basic.”