jenga

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

📸 Photos

People relaxing at the Seattle Center at the conclusion of the march.

It always amuses me when people only decorate one side of their cardboard, because it looks like they’re somewhat confused about their messaging.

This one, seen at the start of the march, made me laugh.

Students, staff, and faculty, lining up for the commencement processional.

Since I’m part of the behind-the-scenes tech team (specifically for me, making sure captioning works properly), this was my view of the ceremony. Not a bad way to do it at all!

Unfortunately, since all of this equipment was actually in use, I couldn’t actually pretend I was firing the Death Star. (The shot of the Death Star weapon control lever being moved used a Grass Valley 1600 video switcher, specifically, one from KCET, Los Angeles’s PBS station.)

📚 Reading

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

🔗 Linking

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

Mirrored from Eclecticism.

Book 32 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you know much of anything about Heavy Metal, you know what to expect with this relaunch of the long-running comic anthology series. Sci-fi/fantasy/horror comics and art (often of the “muscle bound men and women wearing a whole lot of not very much no matter how impractical that might be” variety, of course). As the relaunch issue, this also has several short essays about the history of the magazine and some of the artists who have been involved, particularly Greg Hildebrandt, who died between painting the cover (of the edition I have) and when it was published. Though I was never a subscriber, I’d found the occasional issue, and certainly saw the movie (and have had it in my collection for years, even if it’s not a regular watch), and it’s good to know that the magazine is still going, and that it’s still exactly what your inner ’80s adolescent has been looking for.

Mirrored from Eclecticism.

Book 31 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

My favorite this month was “In the Shells of Broken Things” by A. T. Greenblatt.

Mirrored from Eclecticism.

Book 30 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In a fitting bookend for a series that began with a sci-fi romance between a military officer and a planetary surveyor, it ends with something essentially the same, even to one of the same characters. Much less adventuresome or military than others, this is more of a pleasant, comfortable wrap up for the series, bringing it back to where it started while checking in with many of the remaining characters. While the stories certainly good go on if Bujold chose to write more, this is also a very worthy ending to the series itself.

Mirrored from Eclecticism.