Day 1: Seattle to San Francisco

This was originally planned to be an overnight train trip on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight run, but when an abandoned building burned and was deemed so unstable that it could collapse onto the tracks at any moment, Amtrak cancelled all runs between Seattle and Portland. So, we fly instead!

TSA at SeaTac was fine, and we breezed right through. Found our gate, got some lunch, and settled in to wait to board.

First time flying first class. Not bad at all!

Got to SFO; looks like a nice airport. Started finding out way to the BART station, got on the airport train…and got right back off again — once they manually opened the doors — when it broke down. At least it was still mobile, so it pulled away and another appeared. Got on the BART and went the wrong way, but it was only one stop and then this line reverses to go the other direction, so it was only a minor detour. Taking the scenic route?

Got to the hotel (quite a walk with these backpacks), dropped our stuff off, took a few minutes to rest, and then went out to find food. Wandered up and into Chinatown and discovered that there was a big street market/festival in progress on the main drag. Explored that for a little bit, but it was a bit much after a long day of travel, so we found a good Chinese restaurant for dinner. Walked around a bit more after that, then back to the hotel to crash out.

Day 2: San Francisco

Our first big walking day! Over 20,000 steps. Started from our hotel (a block away from the Transamerica Pyramid) and went down to the ferry terminal, then slowly walked up along the Embarcadero to Pier 39, pausing to take photos and browse interesting looking places as we went.

Grabbed lunch, then had an incredible catamaran sailing tour of the San Francisco Bay, including going under the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather was perfect the entire way, and we got some absolutely gorgeous views of San Francisco. We can highly recommend Adventure Cat Sailing if you get the chance.

When that finished, we continued our walk north along the Embarcadero, eventually making it all the way up to Victorian Park/the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. That was when we turned around…but not without a detour through Ghirardelli Square to pick up a little chocolate.

We walked all the way back down the Embarcadero to the ferry terminal where we’d started, and then back up to the hotel. By that point it was 7 p.m. and we’d been going pretty solidly since 9 a.m., so it was time to stop so we’d be ready for tomorrow.

Day 3: San Francisco

A little less walking today…but not by a lot, I still broke 18,000 steps and went almost 9 miles.

We had a fairly slow morning, eventually making our way up to the closest BART station and heading out to the Mission district. Once we were there, we got a small taco brunch using the “first open place we walk past” method, and it worked great.

From there, we headed up to the Mission San Francisco de Asis, and realized we could tour both the old (1776) mission and the “new” (1918) basilica. Both are gorgeous, and as it was Sunday morning, we were able to listen in to the choir at the end of one of the Sunday morning masses in the basilica.

After that we decided to head towards Golden Gate Park, started that way, and a ways along realized that we were about to cross Haight street. So, we turned and walked the rest of the way there along Haight street, enjoying all the old classic San Francisco homes and the many cute little shops and restaurants along the way, stopping in one for a lunchtime burrito, right through the Haight-Ashbury district until we hit the park.

Once at the park, we ended up finding and riding the carousel, listening to a Hungarian folk trio and the Golden Gate Park Band as they celebrated St. Stephen’s Day, and then spending most of the rest of our time there slowly exploring the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

Eventually we could tell we were wearing down, so we headed out of the park. We found local burgers for dinner, hopped on a Muni train back towards downtown, and made it back to our hotel a little after six. Time to rest!

Day 4 (part 1): San Francisco to…?

This morning we kept nice and slow. Took our time waking up and getting mostly ready to go, then had a brief outing to get breakfast at a corner place we’d passed a few times that looked good (and it was). Back to the hotel for the final load out, then a quick ride on the BART to get to the airport.

Now we’re all checked in, through TSA, lunched, and kicked back at our gate, ready for the next part of our summer adventure….

• ♿️ Work has been pretty standard day-by-day, save for last Thursday when I went up to Shoreline College for the day for a planning retreat for the Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight (CATO), one of the SBCTC groups I’m part of. We got a lot done in planning for the next year, and as this is a group of college representatives from across the state that generally meets only on Zoom, it was nice to get most of us together in person.

• 🎭 Sunday we went out to meet some friends and see Wooden O’s Macbeth Shakespeare in the Park production. It was very well done, though rather surprisingly straightforward after having recently seen the same company do some incredible work incorporating fun tweaks to both The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

• 🗺️ Other than that, most everything has been getting everything ready for our summer vacation — which we’ll be setting off on tomorrow! We’re all packed and ready to go, the house is clean and set, and now it’s just a matter of waiting until it’s time to head off and get things started. This is also a big reason why this post went up today instead of waiting until Sunday as I’d normally do. It’s possible — likely, even — that I may not be posting much until we’re back from this trip. Imagine that!

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Two books finished recently:

• Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall, which was a fun “zombie apocalypse at a Star Trek convention” romp. This was very kindly sent to me a while ago by Elena/theresmiling, and I’ll be passing it along to someone else in turn.

• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I did not like at all, and wouldn’t have finished if it wasn’t part of my Hugo Best Novel reading project.

📺 Watching

Forgot to mention last time that while coming back from our Providence/New York trip, I watched The Gorge, and it was…alright, but not great. The first half of the film, where it’s all setup, teasing the mystery of what’s in the gorge, and developing the relationship between the two characters is a solid three-star film. There was promise here. The second half, where it’s all watching someone play a Playstation zombie-hunting game, is a solid single star.

🔗 Linking

• Michael Bolton at Carnegie: Breaking the PDF Habit in Higher Ed: Why Website Bloat is a Governance Problem, Not a Tech One: Yes, this is basically an ad for Carnegie’s services, but the problem of “PDF bloat” in higher education is real.

• Henk Van Ess at Digital Digging: How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran (archive.is mirror of a paywalled Substack original): “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?” (Google has since removed this “feature”, but…for how long? And seriously, what the fuck?)

• Henk Van Ess at Digital Digging: Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth (archive.is mirror of a paywalled Substack original): “Google has rolled back the image generation feature it launched in Google Earth on 30 July. The tool let anyone zoom to any coordinates, type a sentence, and get back a photorealistic image built on Google’s own satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that spot. It went live worldwide, on the web, with no waitlist. It was withdrawn on 31 July.”

• Gerrad Hall at Entertainment Weekly: Inside CODA director’s follow-up Being Heumann, about Judy Heumann and her fight for disability rights: “Being Heumann, which opens the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10, centers on Judy Heumann, who, after contracting polio as a toddler, used a wheelchair the rest of her life for mobility. […] While Heumann became known as “the mother” of the Disability Rights Movement, she is not widely known outside of the disability community.”

• FlockHopper: See where Flock cameras are in your area, and use the map or iOS app (Android under development) to plan routes that avoid them.

• Reading Maps: Plotting maps from notable books and films to see where the characters went.

• Russell Samora, Florina Sutanto, Arjun Kakkar, and Sushant Karki at The Pudding: Why some people mow a lawn better than others: “You’ve probably done something like mow a lawn or vacuum a rug hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Some part of your brain works out a route that’s usually good enough to get the job done. People are actually pretty good at this, and better than you’d guess for a problem that is hard for computers. We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we built a lawn and asked people to mow it.”

• Danny Westneat at The Seattle Times: WA Democrats face no backlash for ‘millionaires tax’ (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “…after ruling Democrats finally pushed through their own version of a personal income tax this spring, the big question has been: Will they face backlash from voters? ¶ The answer seems to be a resounding ‘No.'” Now we just need to make sure the push to repeal the “millionaire’s tax” fails at the ballot in November.

• Shaun Smucker: Please use AI (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Be sure to use AI when making
  your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
  for example. Definitely do not call
  your friend who loves to cook and ask her
  for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
  to save time making meals,
  because you will end
  up talking for longer than you had hoped,
  hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
  diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
  what she’s planted in her spring
  garden and then lost with the early frost.”

• Sharon Yoo at King5: UW: ICE used Washington driver’s license database in at least 90 immigration arrests over the past year: “Researchers say federal agents continue accessing WA DOL records despite a state law limiting the information from being used for immigration enforcement.”

• Drew Dotson at the Kent Reporter: Renton City Council votes to cover Flock cameras: “‘We’ve been hearing a lot of concerns around transparency and trust, and I think it’s in the best direction to help foster that by listening to the public,’ Councilmember Carmen Rivera said. ‘The camera’s already paused. They’re not collecting anything. If it’s safe and if it’s within the purview of our staff to be able to do it, I think it’s something that is just some easy simple fix that tells the residents one that we’re listening and that we’re trying to foster that trust and that transparency.'” Now if only we could get Kent to back away from their love affair with Flock….

• Amogh Dimri at The Atlantic: The Color Recession May Be Permanent (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “Color trends used to come and go. But the color recession that began early this century has dragged on far longer than the heyday of avocado green in the 1960s or hot pink in the 1980s. ‘Our top color from 2000 to 2010 was ‘Pelham Beige.’ We thought that would never change,’ Sue Wadden, the director of color marketing at the paint company Sherwin-Williams, told me. The next decade, she said, ‘gray was dominant. Like gray, gray, more gray.’ Sherwin-Williams’s current list of its most popular colors for home interiors features ‘Ice Cube’ and ‘Crushed Ice’ (both white), and ‘Agreeable Gray’ and ‘Passive’ (both gray). Colors are now getting warmer again, Wadden noted hopefully, but they’re ‘warmer whites.’ The company’s color of 2026 is ‘Universal Khaki’—otherwise known, unfortunately, as ‘greige.'”

• Luke Plunkett at Aftermath: Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer’s AI Mandates: “‘I work for a company that produces luxury items’, one worker tells me. ‘Any time I get prompted that my ‘token spend’ is too low (0), I go in and ask ChatGPT random gardening questions. So far it has failed to adequately build a rain garden, but I’ve gotten it to describe a sweet potato once.'”

• Brett C.: I’m done using AI: “Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There’s an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don’t think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that’s a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it’s faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience.”

⭐️: Actively disliked this one; a rare instance where I came very close to bailing out and DNF’ing, and only stuck it out because it’s part of my Hugo Best Novel reading project.

A dystopic future where fossil fuels have run out (and, apparently, renewable options like wind (except for sailing ships), solar, hydro, etc. just…aren’t a thing? anywhere? for no discernible reason?) and power comes through kinetic energy stored in ‘kink springs’, and the resulting societal collapse combined with ecological change has devastated food supplies worldwide. The overall background is basically colonialism; substitute genetic engineering agriculture companies for the East India Tea Company and Thailand for India, and you’ve got the gist. Genetic engineering has progressed enough that there are now “New People”; genetically created intelligent artificial life that is genetically encoded to be servile.

One of these New People is the titular “windup girl” (who isn’t actually windup, but New People are intentionally given a way of moving that mimics stop motion/clockwork creations), a sex slave who is repeatedly abused over the course of the story, with some of these instances being explicitly detailed across multiple pages of the story. The first instance within the first few chapters was more than enough for me, having it happen again and in greater detail and length later on was when I almost bailed out of the book entirely. Instead, I just skimmed past and kept skimming through the rest of the book just to get it done with.

Obviously enough people liked it and found it worthwhile for it to win a Best Novel Hugo award, but I can’t recommend it.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: An entertaining adventure as a Star Trek convention becomes ground zero for the zombie apocalypse. A few things here and there that bothered me a bit, but mostly nothing really major. The biggest thing for me was that the authors couldn’t resist giving nearly every person and place very obvious Trek nods for names (the hero is Jim Pike, the hotel is the Botany Bay, and many, many others), and yet, somehow, it seems that none of the die-hard Trek fans at the convention ever notice this or think it’s at all noteworthy. While identifying the names was a fun mini-game as I read, within the context of the story, it broke my suspension of disbelief (apparently, zombies are fine, but insufficiently observant and pedantic Trekkies is over the line).

📸 Photos

I got my photos from Providence and New York uploaded to Flickr. Here are a few favorites; there are many more in the Flickr album.

📚 Reading

After getting home, I finished one book I’d started before we left (Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs Volume 2) and one I’d started towards the end of the trip (Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett).

📺 Watching

While working our way through the flights home on Sunday and Monday, I watched the two most recent live-action Predator movies, Prey and Predator: Badlands. I’m definitely enjoying how Dan Trachtenberg is expanding the Predator mythos, without feeling restricted by following a particular storyline or set of characters, but playing with different stories within the broader universe.

🎧 Listening

This week’s main listening has been a new two-part post-punk/EBM/goth/industrial compilation from Sideline Magazine, United 1 – The Freya Files and United 2 – The Odin Files. Both are free to download, but if you chip in a little money, all proceeds go to support humanitarian and frontline aid efforts in Ukraine (I did).

🔗 Linking

• Emily Wilson at the London Review of Books: An Uncomplicated Man: “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

• Bettina Makalintal at Eater: In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical: “The backlash to AI imagery is growing across a certain part of the culture. Sentiment along the lines of ‘I’d rather see a poster made with Sharpie on a scrap of paper than an AI event flyer,’ or ‘I’m not going to your restaurant if the ad is the AI’ is proliferating. ‘Frictionmaxxing,’ a term that writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined to refer to a rejection of technologies of convenience in favor of slower and more analog processes, has escaped containment, coming to mean the general choice to choose pre-internet ways of creation and problem-solving. In this sense, it can refer to the choice of the handcrafted over the AI-generated.”

• Julian Fong on Mastodon: “I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is. […] Code is art. I work at a studio full of ungodly talented artists, but I will still die on this hill. Code is often messy and dirty and it’s a pain to create and get right but the results reflect the personality of the creator and the pain of the creation. Just like the rest of art. Sometimes you have to look at the source code to see that, but it’s there if you look for it, hidden beneath the surface. ¶ AI generated code is not art.”

• Catherine Rampell: Inside Trump’s Stealth Trick to Rig the Census—and Congress (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “A vaguely ominous but little-noticed regulatory filing issued in late June could have a profound impact on business, immigrants, and the balance of power in our country. […] The actual specifics of those new rules remain scant. But from conversations I’ve been having with people close to the process, it is widely expected that the administration will try to recategorize millions of immigrants (both unauthorized and legal) as not actually living here in the United States.”

• Danny Katch at Revolution for Cowards: We used to be able to buy things in this country (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.”

• Stephanie Rohler at Star Trek.com: Accommodations On Board: A Celebration of Disability in Star Trek: “None of Star Trek‘s disability portrayals and accommodations have been perfect — but that’s alright. Star Trek still exists as a rare piece of fiction that openly begins discussions about what life with disability looks like, and the adaptations necessary for disabled people to find a comfortable home in society. It’s the fact that Star Trek has and keeps including disabled characters that makes the difference, especially in a modern world that argues so often about the rights of disabled people.”

• Nikshep Myle at MSN: AI companies are still buying up old books by the pallet – then shredding them: “Every out-of-print volume that disappears into a scanner may be the last copy accessible to anyone outside an AI lab’s servers. Rare, foreign-language, and low-circulation titles – many never digitized elsewhere – vanish from physical existence after a single scan. Who controls humanity’s textual heritage is no longer a question anyone can afford to leave unanswered, especially as the push to build AI Data Centers accelerates the industry’s resource acquisition at every level.”

• Newsmax: Newsmax and Meta Enter AI Content Partnership (archive.is mirror; I’m not linking directly to Newsmax): Meta is partnering with Newsmax to feed their right-wing claptrap into Meta’s AI chatbots as training material. Don’t be surprised by any Meta chatbot (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) becoming even more right-wing loony than they already are.

• Jasmine Nackash at The Pudding: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us: “While these [“essential vocabulary” lists] were practical tools, built to capture which words people need most, the answer also doubles as a snapshot of ordinary life, 70 years apart: what people were expected to engage with, and had to deal with, in their daily lives. ¶ Treating the lists as an indirect record of day-to-day life, I went through the differences between them from a few angles: what the words were about, how tangible were they, and to which parts of speech they belonged.”

• Cory Turner at NPR: Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out: “Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable. ¶ The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass ‘legislation’ to help the nation’s K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: A fun send-up of Hollywood and our tendency to lose ourselves in the “magic” of cinema, as told through the magic of Discworld. Got quite a few laughs out of this entry in the series.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: As with the first, it’s not so much about the actual quality as the cringe entertainment value.

]]> https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2026/07/26/weekly-notes-july-20-26-2026/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:26:57 +0000 https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/?p=52925 Our travel adventure week continues! When I last left off, we’d just made it to our hotel in Providence….

• ♿️ So all of my days this week were taken up with attending the AHEAD 2026 conference. Lots of good information got poured into my head over the past week. Since this is a broader conference than Accessing Higher Ground (AHG), I tried to find sessions either connected to my usual accessible technology focus, to projects I’m currently involved with, or the wider world of disability services in higher education.
  • Here’s a look at the sessions I attended:
    • Introduction to Disability Law for Disability Office Directors and Staff and ADA/504 Coordinators (a two-day pre-conference session, on Monday and Tuesday)
    • OCR Year in Review
    • Faculty as Partners in Access: Building Collaboration Beyond Compliance
    • Strategies for Enhancing UDL and Digital Accessibility in the Classroom: Insights from Faculty Advocates
    • It’s Not My Problem, Right? Liability and Risks Arising from Inaccessible Third-Parties
    • Hot Topics in Disability Law
    • State & Local Involvement: A Strategy to Impact the Lives of Disabled People (included walking up to the Rhode Island State House building for a tour)
    • Crafting Clear Accommodation Wording
    • Policy to Practice: Accessible Events by Design
  • Overall, the conference was really good, and while I wouldn’t mind going again, I probably get more directly relevant information from AHG when I can go there.
  • It was discouraging how often I heard people talking about how much they’re using genAI and what they’re using it for. Even the occasional mention of genAI’s failings and problematic aspects tended to only come up as afterthoughts after a long digression into “I’m feeding every case I review into Claude to pull out the key points” or some such thing. Sigh. It’s sad to see how many people are so eager to offload critical thinking to something that isn’t doing that and can’t do that.
• 🚶‍♀️ While I was conferencing, my wife was enjoying spending her days walking around and exploring Providence, and acting as entertainment director for our evenings. Among the things she found for us to do:
  • A stop by the Weird Providence bookstore, which was small but very well curated; she picked up an H.P. Lovecraft collection (because of course), while I picked up a Philip K. Dick collection.
  • A tour of the Lippet House Museum, a remarkably well-preserved Victorian mansion.
  • The Providence Ghost Tour. Haunted city tours are always fun, and this was no exception.
  • A gondola ride along Providence’s river through the heart of the city, complete with Italian serenade by the gondolier.
  • And, of course, lots of good food and just enjoying evenings walking around Providence. It’s a really pretty and comfortable city, and we both liked it a lot. If for some reason we decided to move from the west to the east coast, Providence would be high on our list of possible destinations.
• 🚆 When planning this week, we’d decided that as long as we were on the east coast, we might as well take advantage of it, and so rather than flying right back to Seattle, we took Amtrak from Providence to New York City.
  • 🗽 We got in to NYC a bit before noon, checked in to our hotel, grabbed hot dogs from a Times Square street vendor, and started wandering. We started heading down toward Bryant Park and the library, and realized as we were walking that we were across the street from the MoMA.
  • 🖼️ “Wanna go to the MoMA?” “Let’s go to the MoMA!” So we did, and it was incredible. Knowing that the MoMA has an incredible collection is one thing, actually being able to wander through and see it is a whole different thing entirely. So much neat art that I’d read about and seen images of, but now got to see in person. I particularly enjoyed the Marcel Duchamp and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibitions.
  • 🧛🏻 Then, after getting some great NY-style pizza, we walked up to the Palace Theatre to see The Lost Boys, the new musical that just won several Tony awards. Seeing a Tony award winning musical on Broadway in its initial run with the original cast was a real treat! The show itself was great, too. There were a few notable changes from the original film (as expected when translating a film to the stage), but all the key elements were there, and all the changes worked for me. The music was good (arguably perhaps a bit too heavy on power ballads), but don’t go in expecting the classic soundtrack. This is a new show, not a jukebox musical (though bits of “Cry Little Sister” do get worked in at a few key appropriate moments). We really enjoyed ourselves, and if you get a chance to see this, whether on Broadway or when it goes on tour, I’d recommend it.
  • 🍰 On our way back to our hotel after the show, my wife’s cheesecake sensor was in fine form, and she walked us right up to Junior’s Cheesecake, which absolutely lived up to its promise. We each got slices to go, and enjoyed a late night dessert before heading to bed.
  • 🥯 This morning we got up, got some proper NY bagels for breakfast, and wandered down to eat them on the plaza of NYC’s iconic Schwarzman library. From there we walked a bit of a loop back to our hotel so we could walk by the Empire State Building. We didn’t go up to the top, but just enjoyed the view from street level.
  • 🚕 Finally, we checked out of the hotel, hopped in a taxi (still being rather amused that the “stand on the curb and wave” method of hailing a taxi actually works), and headed to LaGuardia airport to start our trip home.
• ✈️ Which, true to form, is becoming its own adventure. For whatever reason, rather than getting a direct NYC-SEA flight, we ended up with a three leg flight, with each leg being on a new plane. Our first leg was from NYC to Omaha, Nebraska, which is where we are as I type this.
  • The Omaha airport, by the way, is not one that we’d recommend (especially for a nearly five-hour layover like we have). It’s small, old, poorly marked, and generally unpleasant. Maybe it’ll be better eventually — they are in the process of renovating and expanding — but at the moment, it’s by far the most unpleasant part of this trip.
• ✈️ The next leg will be from here to Vegas, and then a final jump from Vegas up to Seattle, when we expect to finally land around 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning. So, this post is going up at about 7:30 p.m. Omaha time, still with an hour and a half to go before we leave Nebraska. Not that I’m counting the minutes or anything….

📸 Photos

I brought my “real” camera along for this trip, and have taken a lot of photos, but they won’t be posted until I get through processing them. In the meantime, a few from my phone (not in chronological order).

📚 Reading

While traveling, I’ve finished two more Discworld books by Terry Pratchett (this is my go-to travel reading series at the moment, as I picked the full collection as ebooks some time ago), Guards! Guards! and Eric. Both were fun, and since I still have hours of traveling to go, I’m about to get started on the next one, Moving Pictures.

And that’s it! No links for this week, as most of my brain space was devoted to conferencing and though I was skimming headlines, I didn’t mark anything as particularly noteworthy.

]]> https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2026/07/26/eric-by-terry-pratchett/ Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:35:33 +0000 https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/?p=52934 Book 33 of 2026: Eric by Terry Pratchett

⭐️⭐️⭐️: A shorter book, this is a relatively quick romp through a mashup of three wishes, Discworld’s version of The Odyssey (rather amusing, as I read this just as Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey film was in the theaters), and the joys of mid-level bureaucracy. Not bad, but not a standout.

]]> https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2026/07/25/guards-guards-by-terry-pratchett/ Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:32:56 +0000 https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/?p=52933 Book 32 of 2026: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Dragons large and small, guards of somewhat questionable repute, and, of course, evil schemes for power. Another fun adventure with Pratchett’s undercurrent of social commentary throughout.

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