⭐️⭐️⭐️: Sits right in the center of a Venn diagram with “Star Trek Fans” and “Convention Goers/Conrunners”, which just so happens to be right where I sit too, so…yeah, this was fun. A breezy memoir of the earliest Star Trek fan conventions (except for the first, which is discussed in Star Trek Lives!), with lots of fun details of the behind-the-scenes adventures in putting on the conventions. All long before my convention going time (these cons were held between 1973 and 1976, and I was born in 1973), but even if time and technologies have changed, a lot of the conrunning shenanigans sounded very familiar. Anecdotes about the various Trek stars and other personalities who were the guests of the con mix in, and the whole thing is quite enjoyable.

I’d been on the fence for a while, thanks to his occasional casual ableism (called out here, and then again here). But it was his recent “actually, hanging out in a nazi bar (X) is fine, actually” post and subsequent “but if I had principles, I wouldn’t have any entertainment” whining (“The Ellisons aren’t much better than Musk. Should I stop watching Warner Bros and Paramount movies, HBO, CBS, and CNN?” and “The principled man has nothing to watch.”) that finally pushed me over the edge.

I’m often disappointed that so many high-profile people and businesses, including many of those that Gruber cites as reasons to be on X, are still (or again) posting there. But if someone I liked in the real world decided they wanted to go hang out with a crowd that I found morally, ethically, politically, and in many other ways reprehensible, that’d be their bad decision, and not only would I not join them, but I wouldn’t see much reason to hang out with them, either. It’s easy enough to do that in the virtual world, too.

There are plenty of other people to read and sources of Apple and wider tech commentary and opinion.

Kudos to the many people who have been pushing back against Gruber’s post, including higher profile names more likely to influence Gruber’s thinking (maybe, hopefully, but I’m not optimistic about it) than I am, like Anil Dash over on Bluesky (first thread, second thread, third thread), Lex Friedman on his blog and with a followup, and a few others I saw pass through my reading but can’t remember exactly who and where at this moment.

I’ve been off X/Twitter for almost exactly four years now, since November 20, 2022, and I haven’t missed it. It’s really not difficult to not hang out with racists, nazis, and pedophiles. At least, it isn’t for me. I wish it were that easy for more people.

Updates:

• Gavin Anderegg, John Gruber on X: “I’m not angry, John, I’m just so very tired.” (This led me to the following two.)
• Ernie Smith, The X is Off-Target: “…X is not a welcoming place anymore and in fact comes with more brand harms than brand goods.”
• Dan Sinker, An Open Letter To The People Writing Lengthy Posts About ‘Why I’m Going Back to Twitter’: “What the fuck are you doing?”
• Watts Martin, Checking Prior Assumptions: “Prior assumptions checked. You know what? I’m feeling pretty good about them.”
• Warner Crocker, John Gruber Thinks I’ve Lost My Mind: “…whether you pay for X or just lurk and scroll, you’re giving Musk money to do what he does.”
• Cesare Forelli: “Picking the week in which the owner of Twitter spent 276 millions to help Republicans – just days after the US president abandoned Ukraine to lend a saving hand to Putin – to write some sort of love letter for Twitter is definitely a choice.”
• Jeff Johnson: “Gruber’s post, mere weeks before the midterms, with democracy itself under threat from Trump, doesn’t even mention the moral dilemma of supporting the political propaganda machine of the man who paid $250 million to elect Trump, took a chainsaw to our government, and continues to be the biggest right-wing funder in history.”
• Karl Bode, Casey Newton And John Gruber Slink Back To Elon Musk’s Right-Wing Propaganda Machine: “Tech journalism mainstays are feebly rationalizing their return to a broken, billionaire-run right-wing propaganda website.”
• Tim Bray, I Wasted an Hour on X: “I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: An excellent (and cute) introduction to digital accessibility; less of a detailed “how to” than a good “here’s what to think about and why” starting point. While there wasn’t much new for me, a refresher is never a bad thing, and it’s always good to see how other people explain and convey the concepts and to think about how I do the same and what I might want to adjust in my work.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Reading a Trek novel set in the Kelvin universe is…weird. I was curious about that when I started, as to whether the characters would feel like their Kelvinverse incarnations, or whether this would be your basic Trek adventure with different cover art. To Mack’s credit, the characters do seem to match with their Kelvinverse interpretations, particularly Kirk’s younger, less focused brashness and Spock’s less controlled self (McCoy is McCoy, thanks to the first Kelvin film’s writers and Urban’s performance). The “A plot” adventure is pretty standard Trek adventure, while the “B plot” storyline is more of a direct offshoot of the particular dynamics of the Kelvin universe, even bringing in a key character we never saw in the films. A decent read, but definitely feels a bit off compared to other Trek novels, but that’s likely just as it was meant to be. (It was probably an interesting exercise for Mack as well.)

Compounding the off-kilter feeling is that all this would have been odd enough if the book had been released and I’d read it back when the Kelvinverse was still an active thing. But to be reading it now, when I also have the DIS/SNW versions of Spock, Kirk, Uhura, and Scotty front and center in my mind makes it even weirder. My mental images of the characters kept shifting among their various on-screen presentations. Definitely a little bizarre — similar to reading some of the earliest Trek fiction, actually, from before there as any real oversight of the books and authors (sometimes coming out of the early fanfic communities) were taking some real wild swings at the characters.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Finished two books this week: John and Maria Jose Tenuto’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film, which I enjoyed, and Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned, which I did not.

📺 Watching

We finally started watching season four of Star Trek: Strange News Worlds. Since our summer vacation was right during its broadcast, we’d decided to wait until we got home to start watching it. (Plus, since I cancelled our Paramount+ subscription last year when it was taken over by the Ellison’s, I had to find…other methods to watch it. Oh, wait, is it not talk like a pirate day anymore?) So far we’ve watched the first three episodes, and while they’re certainly leaning into the “wild swings” and genre games rather than thoughtful sci-fi, we’ve been entertained. Time travel and dinosaurs, creepy horror, and “Dude, Where’s My Shuttlecraft”. Apparently, this is the “what if we did a full season of TOS glowing green hands and Abe Lincoln in space episodes?” season.

🔗 Linking

• This is a modern motherfucking website.: “View source. Seriously, right‐click, do it. Everything I just described is sitting right there in plain text, readable top to bottom by a human being, the way the web was meant to be.”

• Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They’re Horrified (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.”

• Sancho Panza: When did Google get so f-ing weird?: “Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.”

• Bastardica: “A foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and / or squish them.”

• Mat​hias S​chäfer: The death of web development education: “The web is a radical democratic medium. Right now, tech oligarchs and fascist movements are trying to dismantle its radical potential. We must ensure that everyone can shape the web. ¶ Participating in independent learning communities, using open technologies based on ethical principles, and building a shared and inclusive digital infrastructure is an act of self-empowerment and emancipation.”

• Ilan Kelman and Matthew Blackett at Phys.org: End of humanity? Blow‑by‑blow account of what would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now: “We already know that a super-eruption on this scale would threaten civilization as we know it. So what exactly would we experience if Yellowstone erupted? We are experts in disasters and volcanoes, and what follows is a thought experiment into what might happen in the worst-case scenario. We’ve based our hypothesis on research and an examination of how countries have dealt with disasters in recent years.”

• Lighthouses of the World: “Every charted light on the planet, on its real cycle.”

• Magda Patynska at Discover Wildlife: Amazing new penguin discovered for first time in over 100 years: “Until recently, the gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) was thought to be a single, wide-spread species, but researchers now have evidence that it consists of four separate species, one of them previously unknown to science.”

⭐️⭐️: I picked this (and its first two sequels) up at the local library book sale a while ago on a whim, as cheesy urban fantasy set in Seattle sounded amusing. Finally got around to reading this one, and it will be going right into the donate pile, along with the next two (still unread). It’s not nearly as funny as it wants to think it is, the plot meanders and gets frequently sidetracked, none of the characters are all that interesting or likable, and there are far too many instances of miss-used commas, the r-slur, fatphobia, and casual transphobia. The highlights were the occasional playlists; if nothing else, the author does at least seem to have decent taste in music.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Another good entry in the Tenutos’ series of “making of” books for the Star Trek films, now covering the “Genesis trilogy” of films II-IV. The same coffee table book style, with lots of photos and interviews throughout. This one features an introduction by Kirk Thatcher (the punk on the bus), and I particularly appreciated the chapter looking at matte paintings and the artists behind them. Books like this always make me a little sad that today’s computer effects mean that so much of this physical artistry has gone by the wayside.

If you have a compilation album where the tracks aren’t numbered (common for things like mashup compilations), the tracks display and play in alphabetical order…but they display alphabetically by track title, and they play alphabetically by artist.

Also still broken: Shuffle by album. (See my post from almost exactly a year ago about this issue in macOS Tahoe.)

In Album view, check Controls > Shuffle, and make sure that Shuffle is set to on and by albums. Double-click the Albums option in the Library section of the sidebar to start audio playing. The first track of the first album by the alphabetically first artist (in my case, A-Ha) starts playing, and the “shuffle” option gets turned off (both in the menu and in the control toolbar).

Same behavior when starting from Songs view.

I’m not sure if there’s even a way to get shuffle by album working in any context at this point.

Also, you used to be able to use a modifier key (I can’t remember if it was option or command, but I think option) to skip to the next album rather than the next track (or to jump the start of the current album). That functionality seems to be gone as well.

I have a large collection (> 43K tracks, 142 days, or 330 GB) of music that lives on my computer. I often like to listen to albums, instead of individual tracks. The combination of those two factors means that “shuffle by album” (and “skip to the next album” or “start this album over”) were some of my more frequently used features of Music/iTunes. And it’s been pissing me off for years now that these seemingly simple ways to listen to music are broken.

I’ve looked at other music players, some of which are album centric, but…

• Most of them are built to tie into Music (the streaming service), not Music (the app/iTunes) playing local files.

• Those that do work with local files don’t have the ability to work with the Music/iTunes “Music Library” file, which means they can’t update play counts, dates, ratings, or any of the other metadata.

• Because I have far more music than I can (or want to) keep on my iPhone, I have lots of smart playlists set up in Music/iTunes that control what music is on my iPhone at any given time.

• Because non-Apple music apps can’t update the Music Library file, play counts and dates don’t get updated, and the smart playlists never update. So if I want the smart playlists to update so that the music selection on my iPhone updates, I’m locked in to using Apple’s Music app(s).

If Apple would…

• get their shit together for music lovers who prefer to own their music rather than stream everything and make Music/iTunes a first-class local audio player again, or
• allow third-party music apps to update track metadata in the Music Library file,

…then I’d probably be fine. Either option would work — but both would be best, because then Apple’s software would suck less, and third-party developers would be able to do more.

Sadly, I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, if ever.

(This rant originally a Mastodon thread.)

]]> https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2026/09/28/macos-golden-gate-music-app-still-crap/feed/ 1 https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2026/09/27/weekly-notes-september-14-17-2026/ Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:30:58 +0000 https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/?p=53151

♿️ Been a very busy couple weeks of work as we’ve been approaching the start of classes for the fall quarter. In addition to the usual preparations and appointments with students, I’ve been part of our Opening Week planning committee. Part of that was helping to make sure that accessibility was kept in mind as we were planning the week’s activities, and part was serving on a subcommittee to come up with a “community engagement” activity.

We tried to come up with a pub quiz-inspired trivia activity (created by people who’d never done pub trivia) that would work both for people there in person and those who were attending via Zoom, with questions drawn from the college’s history. While there were definitely still some bumps, overall I think we did okay; we’ll see what people say as evaluations of the week come in. (A few have come in already, and so far…well, responses are definitely mixed. So it goes!)

🎭 Last Sunday we went to the Union Arts Center’s production of Hamlet with a friend from work, and really enjoyed it. Done in a nice small theater in the round, with a minimalist set, and some very strong performances. If you’re local to Seattle, it runs through Oct. 11.

📸 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.”

]]> https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2026/09/26/the-city-and-the-city-by-china-mieville/ Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:34:28 +0000 https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/?p=53145 Book 42 of 2026: The City and The City by China Miéville. 2010 Hugo Best Novel winner (tied with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl).

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: 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?

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