📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Just one book this week: A Fury Scorned by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski, a Star Trek TNG novel, a bit better than the norm.

🎧 Listening

• Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor and Confessions II have been in heavy rotation this week. Definitely enjoying the new album.

• Also picked up Artoffact Record’s The State of Canada sampler.

🔗 Linking

• Marina Hyde at The Guardian: So it’s Trump 1, Belgium 4 – and the world rejoices. Nothing like failed chicanery to bring us together, is there?: “You’ve heard a lot about shithousery during this tournament. We have even, excruciatingly, seen a few American commentators attempt to use the word in conversation. Guys, please, just – no. It’s not for you. You have ’erbs, ‘a couple things’, and ‘a ways to go’. But let’s call the events of the past few days by the name they deserve in all the languages of the world: Whitehousery. ¶ Some absolute Whitehousery has been on display and the world certainly has a way (singular) to go before we all forget it.”

• Casey Parks at The Washington Post: Trans people are fleeing red states for Seattle. The city can’t keep up. (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “Seattle has long been known as one of the country’s most trans-friendly cities. It banned discrimination on the basis of gender 40 years ago. Its hospitals were among the first to offer gender transition care to young people. And Washington state was the first in the nation to allow trans athletes to compete. ¶ Those protections have always drawn trans people from elsewhere, but in the years before Trump won reelection, nonprofit leaders say, the numbers were small enough, and the newcomers so prepared, that organizations could easily help people settle in. Most arrived with jobs and rental agreements. But after Trump took office and further emboldened conservative lawmakers to strip trans people of rights, Seattle leaders say they began to hear from people with no plan, only a desperate need to move immediately.”

• Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie: How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization: “Some of these rephrasings may feel a little clunky, and they can end up longer than the anthropomorphizing shorthand. This means it takes a little more dedication to use them, but also isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We should stop and think about the tech we are using, or even discussing, and what it actually does.”

• DeFlock: “An open-source project mapping license plate readers.” Find out where Flock and other automated license plate readers are installed in your area.

• Michael Kan at PC Mag: FCC Approves Reflect Orbital’s Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate: “Despite a flood of objections, the FCC has approved a startup’s plan to launch a controversial satellite that’ll use a giant mirror to reflect sunlight to Earth after dark. ¶ On Thursday, the FCC granted California-based Reflect Orbital permission to launch and operate the satellite in low-Earth orbit using the requested radio spectrum. The reflected light from the satellite is supposed to span an area about 3 miles wide on the ground.” This is such a bad idea, for so many reasons.

• Dr. Drang: Old icons: “…Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then.”

• Chris Heath at National Geographic: Inside the secret operation to move the world’s most famous tapestry (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “After more than 900 years in France, the Bayeux Tapestry—one of medieval Europe’s most fragile, priceless treasures—slipped back into England in a controversial overnight operation. Here’s what transporting a 225-foot-long masterwork actually takes.”

• Odette Yousef at NPR: With the white nationalist group Patriot Front, what you see is not what you get: “…those who are closely familiar with Patriot Front’s history and operations warn: Don’t believe what you see. ¶ ‘That is not who they are in private,’ said Len Kamdang, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. ‘Although they were on their best behavior [last] weekend, this is a dangerous group that commits acts of violence all over the country.'”

• Chloe Laws at Marie Claire: Madonna’s Confessions II Deserves to Be the Album of the Summer, But the Response Proves We Still Punish Women for Ageing: “At every point in her career, Madonna has challenged the standards that treat women unfairly—sometimes deliberately, sometimes simply through existing. The ageism she has faced for almost two decades falls into the latter category. From the backlash to ‘Like a Prayer’, to Pepsi dropping her, to the banning of ‘Justify My Love’, to the outrage surrounding Erotica, Madonna has repeatedly found herself at the centre of cultural panic whenever she has challenged expectations around religion, sexuality and womanhood. The criticism she receives today follows the same pattern.”

• Frank Landymore at Futurism: The Logo for Donald Trump International Airport Appears to Be AI Slop: “Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetrical. The wings have an uneven number of feathers. The two olive branches — another error in itself, because the eagle is supposed to be clutching a bundle of arrows in its right-side talon — have differing numbers of leaves. And the shield only has eleven stripes, as opposed to the thirteen that the actual Great Seal is supposed to feature.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️: The Enterprise is called to assist a planet about to be destroyed, and is unable to rescue the entire population. A subplot of seeing if they can pull off a miracle (guess what…), but most interesting as the crew actually attempts to grapple with their inability to save everyone. More introspective than most Trek novels.

• 🎻 Last Saturday we went out to see Raiders of the Lost Ark with live soundtrack performed by the Seattle Symphony. It was a great concert — the combination of an all-time great film and hearing the soundtrack performed live was great.

• 🏳️‍🌈 Last Sunday was Seattle’s Pride parade, and we went for the first time in eight years. We got there about an hour and a half early, found a great spot to sit…and then, unfortunately, ended up with a bunch of inconsiderate people who showed up late and decided that standing directly in front of us was the place to be. Overall, we enjoyed ourselves, and it was definitely good to be back at the parade again, but some aspects could have been better. Maybe next year?

• 🇺🇸 This past weekend, of course, was the 4th of July holiday weekend. Not exactly a holiday we felt like celebrating, for fairly obvious reasons, so we just spent it at home, reading books, watching movies, and rolling our eyes at the various neighbors who don’t care that fireworks are illegal in our city. (With a special, targeted grumble at whoever fired off mortars at 5 a.m. on the 6th, and 2 a.m. on the 7th.)

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Two books this week — one of which was even non-fiction! Still pretty solidly in my wheelhouse, though.

• Infiltrator by W.R. Thompson, an above-average TNG-era Trek novel.

• The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A neat exploration of quantum physics and the nature of the universe through lenses of Black perspectives, queer theory, and pop culture, with one incredibly incorrect sentence that threw me for a loop.

📺 Watching

Three movies of varying quality. In order, worst to best:

• Enola Holmes 3 (2026): ⭐️⭐️: By far the least interesting of the series. The first was the best, the second was a decent sequel, this one barely held our interest.

• Uncharted (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently sourced from a video game I don’t know anything about, this was mostly a perfectly acceptable afternoon action adventure film (Wahlberg has definitely found his niche as a B-movie action star), the final action set piece is over the top and ridiculous in a way that we really enjoyed.

• Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026): A rare sequel that lives up to the original. Just as fun and funny (and violent and bloody), it picked up right where the first ended and goes bigger, but in ways that make sense and are internally consistent while expanding the world.

We also celebrated the holiday weekend by watching the latest Lucy Worsley Investigates on PBS, where she looks at the American Revolution from a British point of view. Highly recommended.

🎧 Listening

Three new albums in rotation these two weeks:

• Doublespeak’s self-titled debut: covers of mostly little-known tracks, by a collaboration between Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yazoo), Neil Arthur (Blancmange), and producer Benge.

• Front 242’s Blackout: their final live album, recorded on their recent farewell tour before formally retiring the band.

• Recovery 2 For You: a Front 242 tribute album and sequel to 2016’s Recovery For You.

🔗 Linking

• Ali Jasemi at The Conversation: Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologis: “…news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.”

• Dana Goldstein at The New York Times: Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.”

• Listen to Wikipedia: Wikipedia edits turned into ambient background music. “Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.”

• Rani Molla at The Verge: I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism: “For decades, compact pickups such as the Toyota Pickup, Ford Ranger, and Nissan Hardbody served as inexpensive, utilitarian vehicles for young buyers, tradespeople, and anyone who simply needed a truck. But as automakers chased higher margins, pickups grew larger, more luxurious, and substantially more expensive. Today, even many entry-level trucks come loaded with luxuries. Slate is betting there is still demand for a truck that prioritizes affordability over amenities.”

  I’m not in the market for a new car, and I’ve never had any interest in a pickup truck, but I’m fascinated by what Slate is trying and I really hope they succeed.

• Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros at The New York Times: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (gift link that may eventually expire; this article is too interactive to be successfully mirrored by archive.is): “Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths. ¶ There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.”

• lcamtuf’s thing: AI children’s books, body horror edition (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “…I’m told that frontier models have surpassed PhD-level intelligence in the summer of 2025. Most of the books in question were published mid-2026 and the artwork points to a flagship model from a major US-based lab. So, in all likelihood, there’s nothing to worry a— Oh… Oh.”

• Lauren Sherrard: 10 Ways to Make Your Emails More Accessible: “Almost every marketing email has accessibility problems. In fact, the Email Markup Consortium found that 99.89% of HTML emails tested contained serious or critical accessibility issues. Out of more than 443,000 emails analysed, only 21 passed all automated accessibility checks.”

• Basic Apple Guy: MacOS California Camino: “…I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.”

• Joe Coughlan at the BBC: Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives: “A rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered at The National Archives in Kew, the only known example of its kind outside the US.”

• Vita Nouva: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt: “The reply [to an IT support ticket] and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him).”

  Fascinating deep dive into web design, middle-eastern history, Arabic typography, only one of which I know much of anything about (and nowhere near this extent).

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: A neat exploration of quantum physics and the nature of the universe through lenses of Black perspectives, queer theory, and pop culture. Mostly really good, but for me, with one significant flaw. While I will happily accept the author’s expertise in physics, there is one specific sentence that is simply, surprisingly, and significantly wrong.

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books are referenced multiple times, and on page 232, the poem “Jabberwocky” is mentioned: “It’s a poem that doesn’t make any sense, composed primarily with words that Lewis Carroll made up.” I’m baffled by the claim that “Jabberwocky” “doesn’t make sense” — yes, many of the words are invented nonsense words, but that’s precisely the beauty and brilliance of the poem, because it absolutely makes sense! The reader knows what is going on; the words may be unfamiliar, but where and how they are used, along with the fun-to-read onomatopoeic nature of them, conveys a very clear story. Honestly, it’s good that this claim showed up a little over two-thirds of the way into the book, due to how severely it threw me out of the book and shook my trust in the author. Any earlier and I might have struggled to keep going.

Still, all in all, a very good book — except for that one sentence.

My result:

YOU ARE…
The Union Organizer
patron saint: Cory Doctorow.
AI is a real tool being used to extract real labor value from real people without paying them. You don’t care about the singularity — you care about the artists, writers, and workers getting strip-mined by capital. You’re not anti-technology. You’re anti-theft.

Looking at the full list of possible outcomes, I’d self-identify as one of the following. I think it’s my hedging slightly on some of the answers because of the genAI/ML confusion that pushed me into the result I got. They’re all in the same general “don’t like it, don’t trust it, don’t want it” quadrant, though.

The Luddite (Affectionate)
patron saint: Emily Bender
It doesn’t work the way they claim, it’s making everything worse, and you’d like your internet back, please. You can explain in precise technical detail why it’s a stochastic parrot, and you will, whether or not anyone asked. You’re funnier about this than people give you credit for.

The Digital Hermit
patron saint: Jaron Lanier
You’ve been saying the framing is wrong since before most people had heard of any of this. AI is less a technology than a story Silicon Valley tells to consolidate power, and the story is bad. You read physical books and you don’t need a language model to tell you what they mean.

The Skeptic
patron saint: Ed Zitron
It’s oversold, it’s losing staggering amounts of money, and the harms are arriving faster than the value. You’ve done the math on the unit economics and it doesn’t close. You are loud about this, prolific about this, and you suspect history will vindicate you.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Descendants of Khan and his compatriots face off against the Federation. I found this one to be above average, with much of it being something of an early take on the same issues explored by Strange New Worlds with Number One’s status as an Illyrian in hiding, expanded to explore how a society of genetically engineered humans might deal with how they’d be perceived by the Federation. As often happens with any eugenics storyline, it would be improved if the Federation was more honest and introspective about how initial fear and caution has developed into long-standing systemic bigotry, but as Star Trek has yet to really tackle that aspect of the universe, I wouldn’t really have expected it from a thirty-year-old novel.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a noir detective mystery in an alternate-present Sitka, Alaska.

• Meg Elison’s latest, Foundling Fathers, a very funny and sharp bit of sci-fi political satire that I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

• Fantasy Island (2020): A horror prequel-of-sorts to the ’70s TV show. It was entertaining enough for a lazy afternoon.

• TRON: Ares (2025): Looks great, sounds great, no real substance and completely breaks my suspension of disbelief.

🔗 Linking

• Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times: Seattle uses AI to help triage, divert 911 medical calls (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “For more than two years, a Denmark-based company’s artificial intelligence technology has been listening to Seattle residents’ 911 medical calls without their knowledge. ¶ And the Seattle Fire Department has been using the company’s AI to help dispatchers decide which callers don’t deserve a rapid response.”

• Catalina Gaitán at the Seattle Times: Judge to decide fate of Seattle’s unofficial nude beach (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): I’ve never been to this beach, but I know people who have and who would be disappointed if the NIMBYs got their way.

• James D. Walsh at New York magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Battle ramps up over WA ballot measure to bar transgender students from girls’ sports: In case you thought Washington was too blue to have to deal with this transphobic crap.

• Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: “It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (‘No copyright intended!’) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”

• Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real: “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. ¶ The key word, of course, is ‘fake.’ Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Conservative techbros clone America’s founding fathers and raise them in isolation as if it were the 18th century, training them to bring America back to its former glory…until one of them finds a stray iPhone. A very funny and incisive sci-fi political satire; highly recommended.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Hard-boiled noir detective fiction set in an alternate present where Sitka, Alaska is home to resettled Jews after Israel failed to become its own nation after WWII. In addition to being a fun and incredibly well-written noir, the Alaskan setting is great. I grew up in Alaska, and though I pretty much stayed in Anchorage and have only been to Sitka once on a cruise long after I’d moved south, Chabon’s descriptions of Alaskan locales, weather, and people feel oh so familiar. At least the secular bits; as a lapsed Episcopalian, I can’t speak to the Jewishness of it all. Excellent book.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Three books finished over these two weeks, one of which was even non-fiction!

• Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb, a mystery and sequel to the somewhat notorious (in SF circles) Bimbos of the Death Sun.

• The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, which did a wonderful job of reinforcing my anti-AI biases.

• Possession by J.M. Dillard and Kathleen O’Malley, a TNG-era Star Trek novel.

📺 Watching

• This afternoon we watched Send Help (2026), Sam Raimi’s latest horror comedy, and really enjoyed it. Dark, twisted, funny, and with a very satisfying end.

🔗 Linking

• Sarah Mizes-Tan at KNKX/NPR: Transgender ballot initiative could require genital exams for WA secondary school students: Just in case you thought WA was too blue for this sort of bigotry: “Student athletes in Washington state who want to compete in girls’ sports would likely have to obtain genital exams to participate if a controversial ballot initiative passes in November.”

• Heidi Groover at the Seattle Times: Downtown Seattle may house new data center: “A Texas real estate firm filed permit applications with the city last week proposing a six-story building including a data center, office and retail space at Third Avenue and Virginia Street. The location once housed a Bed Bath & Beyond store and since last year has been home to the contemporary arts center Cannonball Arts.”

• Ex Astris Scientia: The Evolution of Screen Ratios in Star Trek: “This article looks at the technical standards that shaped television and cinema, the artistic choices that influenced how Trek moved between these formats and how the franchise entered the era of modern widescreen TV with its new possibilities. It also highlights some odd and inconsequential decisions along the way, including humorous uses of inconsistent aspect ratios in crossovers. Finally, it examines the pros and cons of ‘cinematic’ screen ratios for television series.”

• Hunter Ingram at Variety: How ‘For All Mankind’ Works With Apple to Revive and Upgrade the Forgotten Newton as Its Alt-History iPhone: “Apple products and their use in film and TV have long been a source of conversation. Who can carry an iPhone on screen? Are bad guys forced to use nondescript phones and computers so as not to sow chaos with a device bearing Apple’s famous logo? Well, ‘For All Mankind’ asks a different question altogether: Can its characters use a completely forgotten Apple product canceled two decades ago?”

• Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb, and Gabe Cohen at CNN: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive: “The March 2026 executive order is one of several moves Trump has made recently to seek federal control over elections and restrict mail-in voting, which he has repeatedly cast as a tool used by his opponents for election cheating despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

• Better Images of AI: “We aim to create a new repository of better images of AI that anyone can use, starting with a collection of inspirational images. We will continue to gather images for this repository and commission original work. We welcome image submissions and funding to commission and brief more artists.”

• John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications: “Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a ‘basic competence’ issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me?”

• Catherynne M. Valente: The Democratic Urge to Lose (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “I’ll tell you what we’re doing here. The same thing we do every single time a Democratic candidate gets any traction or momentum at all. Passively watch the media tuck a napkin into its bib and eat that D alive with a massive bowl of hot buttery hypocrisy to dunk them in before shrugging helplessly and losing again. What else could we possibly do? Not demand youth and experience and a perfect personal life from the cradle on and massively overclocked charisma and perfectly pure policy stances that satisfy the whole tent from blue dog to radical leftist from every single candidate for every single office or else fascism can just take us all? Don’t be stupid, if we did that, we might win!”

• Chris Person at Aftermath: Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes: “But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about.”

• BBSG: Bash Static Site Generator: “BSSG processes Markdown files and builds a minimal, accessible website suitable for personal journals, daily writing, or introspective personal newspapers.” Thinking this might be my first step into moving to a static site generator.