michaelhans.com
Weekly Notes: September 28–October 4, 2026
* ♿️ Another busy week with the start of the quarter, but not at all a bad week. A particular moment of personal triumph: As part of our Opening Week committee, I’d pushed for a hybrid (both in-person and online) approach, rather than just requiring everyone to show up on campus in person (and therefore excluding those who live and work remotely, have disabilities that make coming to campus and/or participating in big, crowded, group things more difficult, etc.), and we ended up going that way. In our post-event discussion meeting, two people said the they weren’t on board with the hybrid approach but went with the group decision, but after seeing how the week went and reading the positive feedback from participants, are now on board with the hybrid approach. I’m quite pleased about this! Which isn’t to say it was perfect, we definitely picked up on areas that need to be adjusted as we go forward, but overall, we did a good job.
* ♿️🚊 Also at work this week, a small group of us went up to see a piece of artwork that Sound Transit has recently installed at the Kent-Des Moines light rail station. The art is designed to be tactile, and was created in consultation with several visually disabled Highline students. While I wasn’t directly involved with the project, I’d known about it and had been enjoying hearing about it as the project proceeded, and it was really neat to see the final installation.
* 🎭 This afternoon we went out to see the Renton Civic Theatre’s production of Noises Off. Noises Off has been a long-time favorite of ours (really, how can it _not_ be?), and RCT did a good job with it. I was particularly amused by Rachael Spencer’s Brooke Ashton; her bits of business when she wasn’t directly part of the dialogue or action were consistently entertaining. Also, this was the first production of Noises Off I’ve been to where the stage reset between acts was done with the curtains open, and it was a lot of fun to watch the tech crew strike, rotate, and reset the set. It was also a blast listening to the audience, and identifying both people who were laughing because they were familiar with the show, and those who were laughing because it was their first time seeing it. Well worth seeing, and if you’re local, is running through October 18th.
## 📸 Photos
One of the visually disabled students involved with the project exploring the textures of the mural with a friend. I have more photos of the mural on Flickr.
## 📚 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.”
* Mathias Schäfer: 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.”
