📸 Photos

Vacation photos continue to be worked on, and my photos from Frankfurt and from Berlin are now up.

📚 Reading

I finished China Miéville’s The City and The City, which I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

Two films this weekend:

• Project Hail Mary (2026): Good, but didn’t “wow” me as much as it did many, I think. I’m not sure that it needed to be two and a half hours long, and while it’s possible it suffered in translation from page to film, but a lot of the science felt more like magic to me. I did really appreciate Rocky being a practical effect, though.

• Stop! That! Train! (2026): Honestly, better and funnier than I expected. Absolutely a ridiculous, low-brow, Drag Race-meets-Airplane disaster movie spoof with virtually non-stop rapid-fire jokes, not all of which land. But there were a lot of jokes that really made me laugh out loud.

🔗 Linking

• Alan Siegel at The Ringer: Keep Chasing That Bird: The Oral History of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: “These days, battles between art and commerce don’t tend to end well for the artists. But every so often, the little guy manages to avoid the anvil—and win.”

• Ernie Smith at Tedium: alt.time-capsule.reopened: “I think what stands out to me about Usenet-Rewind is that it more or less captures all of it, warts and all. I did a search for my late ’90s email address, and found numerous entries under my name. I then did a search at my email addresses for the two colleges I went to and found a bunch more posts. And I’m not going to lie, most of those posts were not written with the assumption that they would be a part of the permanent record 25 years later.”

• Frederic J. Frommer at The Contrarian: Congress Moved Quickly to Name Kennedy Center in Wake of JFK Assassination (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Given Kennedy’s muscular support for the cultural center, many thought it a natural tribute to name it for him after his death.”

• Catalina Gaitán at The Seattle Times: Seattle bans discrimination against polyamorous, nonmonogamous people (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to pass a law barring discrimination in employment, housing, business licensure, park usage, policing and public accommodation against adults in consensual relationships with more than one partner. ¶ The bill also expands such protections to nonbinary people in general by removing “male or female” from the city’s definition of sexual orientation, and broadens the protected category’s definition to include pansexuality — attraction to people regardless of gender identity — and asexuality — not experiencing sexual attraction while sometimes experiencing romantic or significant connection to other people.”

• Corinne Purtill at The L.A. Times: New evidence shows that you are only slightly hotter than a T. rex: Fun science, and a rather hilarious (rude!) headline.

• Mike Masnick and Dave Willner at TechDirt: The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy: “For all the talk of “AI Safety” risk these days, the most present real risks remain variations on the theme of “humans doing stupid shit”. Sometimes really smart humans. But stupid actions by humans are a lot less headline grabbing than the shiny sexy apocalypse. A human accidentally causing a radioactive chain reaction by carelessly using a screwdriver to separate things is stupid. Skynet turning everyone into paperclips… is kind of cool and fun. ¶ But, as anyone who works in risk mitigation (including one of the authors of this piece) can tell you, the overwhelming majority of actual disasters aren’t cool and fun. Instead, they’re usually more like the Demon Core: stupid, disappointing, and easily prevented if only a few common sense steps had been taken.”

• David Gutman and Jim Brunner at The Seattle Times: Judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit seeking WA voter records (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “It was the 25th loss in a row for the Trump Justice Department in its demands for similar voter data from states.”

• Ryan Epps at Polygon: Fahrenheit 451’s opening line still burns, 73 years later: “All he needed was six words. That’s all Bradbury required to introduce one of the most famous dystopian novels ever written. The sentence is almost comically straightforward, which makes its meaning all the more horrifying. Bradbury doesn’t begin by explaining why books are forbidden or by introducing the society that outlawed them. Instead, he puts us directly inside the head of the story’s protagonist, Guy Montag, a fireman whose very job is to burn said books. The pleasure isn’t metaphorical. Montag genuinely enjoys watching books of all kinds erupt into flames.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Mostly a crime noir, but set in two cities that share the same physical space but do not interact. The crime novel part is a good mystery; the setting itself is fascinating and has me looking at the spaces I live in differently.

Absolutely baffled that this tied with The Windup Girl, which I gave one star and was sorely tempted not to finish. What was up with the Hugo voters in 2010?

• 🥱 The big theme for this week was jet lag. 10 hours of time change is a lot to adjust to, and it was only at the end of the week that we really started feeling like we were about back to a regular sleep schedule.

• ♿️ Since I figured jet lag would be a thing, I took a couple recovery days, and so only came back to work on Thursday. Those two days of work were, unsurprisingly, pretty much dedicated to getting caught up and triaging through the hundreds of emails that were waiting for me after a month away.

• 🚀 Saturday was the first ConCom planning meeting for Norwescon 49, and it was good to start getting back into the swing of things there. Plus, I came home with a box full of more goodies to scan for the historical archives, which was fun as well.

📸 Photos

I’ve started the process of uploading my photos from the trip. It’ll take a while to get through everything, but San Francisco is up.

📚 Reading

While traveling, I read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels Reaper Man and Witches Abroad, and finished the next one, Small Gods, and a Star Trek novel I’d started just before we left, John Peel’s The Death of Princes, over the course of the week.

📺 Watching

I didn’t get through all of it, but I watched all of the first season and a couple episodes of the second season of the classic ’80s cyberpunk series Max Headroom while on the flights to and from Europe, and it’s a lot of fun. Dated in many ways, sure, but a lot of the themes that are in the storylines actually hold up pretty well today. Definitely need to find time to finish the rest of the second season.

🎧 Listening

I’ve been enjoying listening to the CDs I picked up while traveling:

• Hooverphonic, Blue Wonder Power Milk
• Holy Ghost!, Dynamics
• Blood and Computers
• Dependence – Next Level Electronics
• Dependence – Next Level Electronics Volume 2
• Dependence – Next Level Electronics 2015

Plus, a few purchases from Bandcamp:

• Pop Will Eat Itself, Ruff Justice (PWEI.40 Rework)
• Orbital, Lush (2025)
• Synthetic. Facts. Nine.

🔗 Linking

Some of these links got saved while I was traveling, so they may not all be super current.

• Sophie McBain at The Guardian: Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’: “More than four decades after his Holocaust story Maus transformed the graphic novel genre, Art Spiegelman discusses Trump, the shadow of 9/11 and the rise of fascism in America”

• Jessamyn West at Librarian.net: How to disable or avoid intrusive AI: “One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides “what is taking up all my cloud storage?”) is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don’t want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment.”

• Stephannie Stokes at The Seattle Times: A one-of-a-kind partnership gets community college students housed (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “Since 2020, Highline College has paired students facing homelessness with housing vouchers provided by the King County Housing Authority, covering their rent for up to four and a half years or until six months after they graduate.” Neat article about a very cool program at Highline College.

• Rui Carmo at The Tao of Mac: Apple Papercuts: “This isn’t about Liquid Glass or grand design failures–those are well documented elsewhere. This is about the small stuff. The papercuts that, individually, you learn to live with, and collectively make you wonder whether anyone at Apple actually uses their software.”

• Angela Lim at The Seattle Times: Old 7-Eleven in downtown Seattle becomes ‘Inconvenience Store’ exhibit (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The shop, stationed in a building that formerly housed a downtown 7-Eleven, includes a hot bar, checkout counter and refrigerator. But rather than offering quick grab-and-go options, this one sells beeswax egg votive candles, shoulder bags made out of Cheetos and Lays wrappers, Nerds Gummy Clusters keychains and a pretangled USB cord.”

• Ian Sample at The Guardian: Rich people more likely to steal children’s sweets, finds Ig Nobel prize-winning study: “Piff and his colleagues found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut other cars off at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings. Wealthier people also appeared more willing to lie at work. In one experiment, volunteers were left alone with a jar of sweets ostensibly meant for children. When the researchers returned, upper-class people had snaffled nearly twice as many candies as lower-class people.”

• Jewel Bright at NPR: The U.N. backs a new world map showing Africa in its true relative size: “The ‘Correct the Map’ resolution, introduced by the West African country of Togo on behalf of the African Group (the 54 African member states at the U.N.) and supported by the African Union, was adopted on Friday by a vote of 164 to one, with six countries abstaining. ¶ The United States was the only country to vote against it.”

• Angelina Chapin at The Guardian (in 2016, but I just came across it): WD-40 and microwaved tampons: secrets of food photography revealed: “Behind most professional food photos is a stylist who tricks the viewer. These deceits range from a touch of lipstick to redden a strawberry, to ‘milkshakes’ made from mashed potatoes. It’s not that food stylists are liars and cheats. They’re simply in the business of improvisation.”

• Robert Hart at The Verge: Why AI food looks like that (archive.today mirror of a paywalled original): “There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There’s also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading as brains, and other masonry-adjacent cuisine. I don’t even know how to begin describing this monstrous attempt of a burger, and the less said about the trypophobic burrito from hell, grubs and all, the better. There are lumps. And holes. So many holes.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Coming in November: A big election for WA’s Supreme Court: “The five elections are, in a way, statewide proxy battles between conservatives and liberals, with four challengers endorsed by the state Republican Party against candidates favored by Democratic leaders, including two new appointees of Gov. Bob Ferguson.”

• Eddy Frankel at The Guardian: A constipated baby and a kid that looks like Boris Johnson: why would anyone bother stealing a Renoir?: “Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of impressionism’s head honchos, a leading figure in one of 19th-century art’s most important movements. But time hasn’t been too kind to poor old Pierre. Where his contemporaries like Monet, Cézanne and Degas have been heralded as modernist revolutionaries, artists who shaped the future of western painting and helped set the path that all of their successors would soon follow, in recent years Renoir has been denigrated, mocked, protested and hashtagged.”

• Judd Legum at Popular Information: The hidden dangers of Musk’s votesafe.org: “The slick voter registration website, currently being promoted to millions of people, is a digital surveillance machine.”

• Terence Eden: Put an AV test at the start of your slides: Good advice that I need to remember.

• Melissa Santos at Axios Seattle: Seattle’s civil rights laws could soon cover polyamory: “The measure would make people who engage in consensual nonmonogamy, including polyamory, a protected class that can’t be discriminated against in areas such as housing or employment.” This would be a boon to a lot of people I know.

• Meredith Blake at The Contrarian: The Rise of the Infinite Cable News Ticker (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “The news ticker was not exactly an unknown concept in 2001. The iconic Motograph News Bulletin in Times Square — a.k.a. “The Zipper” — had been flashing headlines from around the world for more than 70 years. But before September 11, the feature was used sparingly on TV, usually to display stock prices during financial news programs or share storm warnings in specific regions. ¶ By December 2001, however, constantly scrolling headlines became a permanent fixture on TV.”

• Michael Cragg at The Guardian: ‘You start to worry you’ll never listen to anything else’: 25 years of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the song that saw the future of pop: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head wasn’t just ‘good, for a pop song’, as joyless people were wont to say, keen to use the caveat in case their muso credentials be tarnished. As pop began to absorb the outre production styles of R&B experimentalists such as the Neptunes and Timbaland – Britney’s career-restructuring I’m a Slave 4 U, produced by the former, would arrive in the same month as Can’t Get You Out of My Head – audiences were becoming more attuned to pop that was looking to push the boundaries. This felt like dance-pop beamed in from the future, where the first time you hear it you’re like, ‘Huh?’ then the second you’re like, ‘Wait!’ and then the 35th time you start to worry you may never listen to anything else.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Solidly average, most notable for the number of overt A-Team references given to Barclay.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Pratchett takes on religion, belief, godhood, corruption, holy wars, goodness, and compassion, and does it all with style, humor, and heart. The Turtle moves.

Day 24 (part 2): London to Seattle

Finally, we’re at the end. We flew out of Heathrow airport, flying home via British Airways in their Premium Economy class. It’s really nice! Not business/first class nice, of course, but a definite step up from coach. Shorter domestic flights well likely stick with standard coach class, but for anything long-haul, it’s worth the extra money.

Unfortunately, even with the extra leg room and all, I still can’t actually sleep on planes, so it was a long ten hours. Watched The Mandalorean and Grogu, which was a perfectly serviceable extra-long episode of the series, but I’m glad I wasn’t tempted to pay to see it in the theater. I don’t feel like I lost anything by watching it on the back of an airline seat. Also watched Ready Player One, which was entertaining fluff; even having read the book and knowing how pop-culture dependent it is, mostly I was impressed at how many characters, items, and visuals they got permission to include, and I’m sure I only caught a small fraction, as I was watching a fairly highly compressed version (judging by how muddy it got during quick action scenes) on an airplane seat console. And I read some more of the Discworld book I’m currently reading, Small Gods.

Eventually, the plane landed, we breezed through incoming customs, caught a Lyft, and we are home again! It’s been a great trip, but after three and a half weeks, we’re so happy to be sleeping in our own beds again.

Many more photos to come over the coming weeks (or months) as I get through processing them all!

Random Travel Thoughts

And finally, a few random thoughts and comments that have come up while we’ve been traveling but didn’t make it into the earlier posts:

• Euro convenience food is better than ours, with more variety and much better quality. This may well be a side effect of so much of Europe’s grocery/shopping norms operating on a “shop regularly for a day to a few days at a time” cadence rather than the U.S.-ian “shop every week or two unless you do monthly/semi-monthly Costco runs” cadence; even their “convenience” stores are closer to just being small grocery stores, with a wider range of choices. It made grabbing easy in-hotel dinners and breakfasts very easy, and was much more affordable than if we’d gone to restaurants for every meal.

• Without planning it this way, we travelled in inverse likelihood of encountering cigarette smoke. Germany (Frankfurt and Berlin) was smoke everywhere (walking through the Berlin zoo, with ashtrays on all the garbage cans, parents calmly puffing on cigarettes while shepherding children around, and some smaller semi-enclosed viewing areas that we simply couldn’t go into because of the stench was a truly bizarre experience), Amsterdam almost as bad, Brussels a bit less. Paris was much less smokey than we expected; it was almost at US/UK levels. The UK is more like the US, where cigarettes are around on the streets and in some public areas, but generally briefly and/or can be avoided in most cases, and many large public spaces and parks are designated no-smoking areas.

• Pot smoke was nonexistent in Germany, which was nice. Some in Amsterdam, which was expected, it wasn’t as prevalent as we thought it might be. I don’t remember encountering any in Paris or Berlin, and I’m not sure about Brussels. (As with cigarettes, I don’t particularly care if people smoke pot or otherwise use marijuana, I just really don’t like the smell of the smoke and prefer it when people don’t force me to unwillingly participate in their indulgences.)

• US tow trucks assume enough space to maneuver the car and tow truck around to tow or winch the car up onto a flatbed. Euro tow trucks assume they’ll need a crane to hoist the car onto the flatbed.

• There have been so few pickups, SUVs and the like, etc. Virtually nonexistent for most of the trip; all vehicles were small, reasonable cars or work vans. Have spotted a few in London, but they’re still in the minority. It’s been so nice to spend three weeks without giant SUVs and status-symbol pickup trucks dominating the roads. And while we did see Teslas, they weren’t as numerous as they are in Seattle (or were in San Francisco), and thanks to the EU/UK’s stricter safety regulations, not a single Cybertruck!

• Germany and London had the best train/tram transit. Amsterdam’s trams are good but they need more cars; the trams were always overcrowded (but we did like the rear-of-train secondary person).

• Though the UK is a walk-on-the-left country, London has so many tourists from walk-on-the-right countries that the end result is that all pedestrian spaces are effectively a chaotic free for all, with enough inability to predict where anyone will be, is going to be, or which direction they’ll be coming from at any moment to make Heisenberg himself giddy. Escalators, on the other hand, are a no-nonsense hard line: stand to the right, walk on the left, violators will be shoved.

Day 18 (part 2): Paris to London

When we hopped on a train in Paris, we headed out of the EU and through the Chunnel to London. The border crossing in the terminal was a little hectic and unpleasant, as there were few clear instructions until you did something a little wrong, when you got firmly corrected, and at first we didn’t understand why we had to do the whole passport scan and biometric photo check twice in a row, ten feet apart. It made sense after the fact — the first time was leaving the EU, the second time was entering the UK — but as a first-timer, the system really feels designed by and for people who do it regularly and can breeze through, rather than newbies. Still, we didn’t make any major errors, got through, and got on the train without any real major hassle.

The train ride was as pleasant as any have been, with pretty views of the French and English countryside as we went. The Chunnel, of course, isn’t much for scenery, but it’s fun to have done that.

The train ends at St. Pancras, part of a complex with King’s Cross, so it was relatively easy to find our way to the correct Underground platform and make our way to the Tower Hill station. From there, it’s just a couple blocks around the Tower of London to the Tower Hotel where we’re staying. This is the same hotel we stayed at last time we were here; it’s a funky old brutalist exterior (according to Wikipedia, “voted the second most hated building in London in a 2006 BBC poll”) with very ’70s British interior and gorgeous views of Tower Bridge, and we like it a lot. We got settled in and called it a night.

Day 19: London

For our first full day in London, we didn’t have anything planned until the evening, so we decided to start our day with wandering around and exploring the local sights on foot. Since there’s a particularly notable sight right outside our hotel window, we decided to do something we’d skipped on our last visit, and do the Tower Bridge tour. Seeing a bit of the inside was neat — Victorians weren’t exactly minimalists, and even the interior spaces are impressively crafted. The tour goes up one of the towers, across the upper walkways (which now have glass floor sections), then down again, and then down into the old steam engine rooms (not used anymore). Fun start to the day!

From there we wandered up the Queen’s Walk along the Thames, wandered through the Borough Market and sampled a few different goodies for lunch, found the Golden Hinde and explored that, then went through the Clink prison museum, and then went back to the hotel for a bit to give our feet a rest.

For our evening adventure, we walked back up the Queen’s Walk to Shakespeare’s Globe to see Much Ado About Nothing. Their production was wonderful, as expected, and seeing a long-time favorite play at the Globe was a real treat. A nice nighttime walk back to the hotel afterwards, and off to bed.

Day 20: London

This day had originally been entirely unplanned, but then last night we were browsing the London theater options before Much Ado started, and we’d made an impulse decision to add another performance to our itinerary.

But that wasn’t until the evening, so we started our day by being very touristy and hopping onto one of the “hop on hop off” open-top city tour buses that constantly run around d the city. We figured this would be a good way to get a peek at areas of London we wouldn’t otherwise see, and maybe help us find ideas for more things to explore during other unplanned times. It was a grey and lightly rainy day, so while we were comfortable sitting on the open top deck for a while, eventually it got to be raining hard enough that we came down to the lower enclosed deck. Not long after that, the bus suddenly filled with other people who decided to use it as a good way to get out of the rain. We stayed on just long enough for the rain to slack off a bit, and then hopped off at Notting Hill.

We took a slow wander up Notting Hill (even spotting the storefront used for the film) to Portobello Road, poking in little shops along the way. We found me a new hat and a few more CDs, got lunch, and wandered back to the bus stop.

We hopped back on the bus, intending to ride it the rest of the way around the loop to where we started. Unfortunately, for some reason, it seemed this driver had other plans, and we ended up literally going in circles. We went around one block twice, then passed the Marble Arch at least four times, and eventually ended up going entirely rogue, heading down a street not on the published bus route. Eventually it got back on route, but by then it had taken much longer to get there than it should have and we no longer trusted the driver, so we hopped off at the next stop and took the tube back to the hotel.

We had about a hour or so to rest, and then it was back on the tube and out to the theatre district to see our impulse purchase show, Avenue Q. We’d both heard about it for years and had had it on our “want to see” lists, and it did not disappoint. Funny, raunchy, and sweet, and absolutely fascinating to watch, as the performers handled their puppets. After the show, another tube ride back to the hotel and off to bed.

Day 21: London

Having had two pretty full days, we gave ourselves a slow morning and didn’t leave hotel until after noon. Once we did, we took the Underground up to Trafalgar Square. We started with a couple hours in the National Portrait Gallery, then went on to the National Gallery, giving us a nice afternoon of gorgeous and historic art.

We found dinner, then went to our third show in three nights and saw The Producers. While we’re both very familiar with the film version of the musical, this was our first time seeing it on stage, and it was hilarious…and, honestly, at times a little unsettling. I mean, it’s one thing seeing “Springtime for Hitler” on your TV screen, it’s quite another, no matter how hilarious, to be sitting in a theater with giant red, white, and black swastika banners dominating the stage. Mel Brooks knows, though: Always mock fascists.

After the show, another tube ride back to hotel, and another late collapse into bed.

Day 22: London

Another more planned day today. We got up a bit earlier in the morning and headed out, taking the tube to Waterloo station, then hopping on the NRS South Western Railway out to Hampton Court. We then spent our day slowly wandering through Hampton Court, letting my Tudor-era Anglophile wife soak up the history. We did have some disappointment in that a large part of the formal gardens was taken over by an upscale car show (which we had no interest in paying £112 to see), but there were other gardens still accessible, and aside from that unfortunate bit of timing, we very much enjoyed the day. We came back to the hotel in the afternoon, and had a quiet hotel evening.

Day 23: London

Took it somewhat slower again, with another day where we didn’t leave the hotel until after noon. (At over three weeks into this trip, we’re definitely flagging a bit.) Once we headed out, we started with some souvenir shopping, then went back out to the theater district. Wandered there for a bit, then saw The Mousetrap (notable both for being a fun Agatha Christie mystery, and for being the world’s longest continuously running play, now in its 74th year).

After the play ended, we started to come back to the hotel and saw that the tube line we wanted from the closest station was delayed with massive crowds in the station, so we bailed out and walked to the next closest station that would have the final line we needed to get to the hotel. Got back, had dinner, and relaxed in the room. Just before crashing out, we got to watch Tower Bridge open and close for a cruise ship passing through.

Day 24 (part 1): London to…?

Travel day! The usual routine: Pack up, check out, and head off towards our next destination! Heading out was a little more trouble some than expected. Turns out today was the day for the London Big Half half-marathon, which attracts some 16,000 runners and starts by going over the Tower Bridge. This was pretty cool to discover when we were getting ready this morning, and we’d take regular breaks from packing to watch runners cross the bridge. But when it was time to go, this was the day we’d planned to give ourselves a bit of a break and take a traditional London Black Cab to our departure point, and we suddenly discovered that the number of roads closed around the Tower Bridge meant that cabs couldn’t get to our hotel. We checked with the concierge, and they just told us that the next closest taxi stand was near the Tower Hill Underground station, which gave us a vague direction to go, but wasn’t exactly clear directions. Apple Maps found us a taxi stand, though, and just a few minutes later a taxi pulled up to drop someone off, and we were able to hop on. And now we’re settled in and waiting to depart for our next stop.

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