Category: Entertainment

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A round, flying-saucer-shaped building on a bright sunny day, flanked with palm trees.This year’s Worldcon, LAcon V in Los Angeles (well, Anaheim), felt small. And it wasn’t just comparing to older cons like Chicon 7 (2012) and LAcon IV (2006). I don’t know how much of it was that we only went on Sunday (the last Sunday in August), and how much of it was that the section of the convention center they booked was just way too big for the number of attendees, but I gather from what I’ve heard that it was in fact comparatively small for a Worldcon. (It’s also been suggested that some people who ordinarily would have traveled internationally to attend figured it might not be worth the risk.) I don’t know how anyone managed to catch Covid there.

At least the lines for the food trucks were short.

A world-weary woman in jeans, leather jacket, and bloodstained tank top with a stab hole through it, standing next to a cat-shaped creature (prop, not real) made of dried vines, leaves and thorns with a pair of glowing yellow eyes.I mentioned in the post about Katie’s October Daye cosplay that this was our first con since 2019. It was also our first general sci-fi/fantasy con in ages. More bookish, skewing older than comic cons, less cosplay. (There was more cosplay at the Undertale concert we went to on Friday the same weekend. A lot more.) Katie went to several panels on writing and worldbuilding, and I made sure to catch the Murderbot book-to-TV panel.

A sculpture of mirrors and LED strip lights, in the form of a hypercube tesseract, reflecting itself on and on forever.The teenager made a beeline for the video game room, only to discover that it was one person promoting his own games (which at least were interesting), a handful of old game consoles, and another person keeping track of a library of cartridges you could check out. It was cool to try out the old consoles, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly since the sparse attendence meant there wasn’t anyone to play the games with except when I joined him there. The other cool thing he found was an electronics workshop with circuit boards shaped like (among other things) caffeine and theobromine (chocolate) molecules, with LEDs and soldering stations where you could attach the LEDs yourself.

Looking down at the atrium of a hotel lobby. Ringed lights rise above a bar in the center, surrounded by cushy seating areas. A couple of balconies are visible along the inner walls and a staircase or escalator climbs diagonally across the far side.The con was split between the Hilton (which has been there forever) and the newest section of the convention center, next to the classic flying-saucer arena. (I think it was under construction the last time we were here for WonderCon.) Stylisticaly it looks like the expansion built in the 2000s: A curved full-height lobby with floor-to-ceiling windows, a lower level for general space, and an upper level. The difference is that the upper level is also big enough for general space, with portable walls to create breakout conference rooms. This meant even the hallways were gigantic, contributing to the feeling that, as Katie put it, the people were rattling around in a space too big for them.

6-foot-high scaffolding for a marble run.I had a few other panels that I was sort of interested in, but decided to prioritize going through the entire art show and making at least a single pass through the dealer’s room. I don’t regret that decision, because it meant I got to take my time really looking at the art. I didn’t buy much – a handful of books by guests and Hugo nominees, some stickers, a tote bag. They were out of T-shirts in most sizes, so I didn’t get the one they were selling onsite. (I bought the other design online afterward.)

Katie met up with one of her friends, and a family friend I hadn’t seen in years turned out to be helping run registration. Otherwise we didn’t run into anyone we know this time.

The only book I brought for autographs was Good Omens (the Ineffable Graphic Novel), because I hadn’t make time to look through the guest list. Instead, I hastily tossed stuff in my backpack the morning of the con while Katie splashed fake blood on herself for her costume. I remembered Colleen Doran was there, and figured anyone else doing signings I could probably buy something at the con. Most of Sunday’s signings were authors or artists I didn’t know, but I did manage to find Doran’s booth toward the end of the afternoon!

Photo Gallery on Flickr

A round building in the foreground, and a wavy-looking glass building in the background, with palm frons reaching down from the top of the frame.

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Last weekend we went to WorldCon / LAcon V for a day. It was our first convention since 2019 (for, you know, reasons), and Katie finally got to build a rose goblin and cosplay as October Daye, something she’s been planning to for years. (Basically since we were gifted the jacket.)

Spike is described in the books as a cross between a rose bush and a cat. Three craft store grape-vine wreaths, soaked for reshaping, give it structure. Bougainvillea vines are woven through it to add thorns, though she ended up trimming them so it wouldn’t be hazardous if someone grabbed it, or if someone else’s costume brushed up against it. (We both managed to stab ourselves on the thorns while she was making it.) She cut a bunch of artificial leaves to look like rose leaves, and sewed them onto the vines.

For the eyes, a pair of LEDs are hooked up to a battery (the switch hidden under leaves) and placed inside mini ping-pong balls, held in place inside the head by wire.

Originally she was planning to put it on a skateboard and pull it along behind her, holding it on using magnets and washers, but the magnets turned out not to be strong enough. So the day before the con, she scrapped the skateboard and built a handle into Spike’s back so she could carry it around. It turned out to be better anyway, since the skateboard wouldn’t have gone on an escalator!

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Back in the 1980s or early 1990s, I remember a motel that dropped out of the “Comfort Inn” chain. They reused existing signage by picking the name “Com-on Inn,” so they only had to replace a couple of letters. Something made me think of it recently, so I went looking to see if it was still around, or if I could at least find where it was.

DuckDuckGo didn’t find anything with the name (though when I did an image search, the broader criteria came up with a number of Comfort Inn locations). The closest Google suggested was a “C’mon Inn” in Grand Forks. I knew the general area it had to be in, so I went looking on Google Street View for something that looked right.

And I found it! A few blocks from where I thought it ought to be, and the building looked slightly different than I expected. But it’s in Monterey Park, next to a 7-11 (which jogged a memory), and the 2007 street view image is just barely legible enough to prove that even if I remembered the wrong location, I was right to remember that it actually existed!

Backlit view of a three-level hotel building with a pass-through driveway. Above the driveway you can barely see a circle and the letters "COM-ON INN" in roughly the same style as the old Comfort Inn logo.

Between 2007 and 2012 it appears to have been rebranded as the Floral Inn, and sometime after 2017 it became a Motel 6.

Now I’m trying to think of other signs that have been reused like this. I know I’ve seen others! But at the moment, all I’m coming up with are entirely new signs placed in a distinctive rounded-triangle housing. I’ve seen enough of those that I seriously considered making a “Used To Be a Winchell’s” Tumblr in the previous decade!

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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I’ve always been more on the Tsundoku side. I don’t need suggestions for what might be interesting to read. I have books. Lots of them, both print and digital. What I need is to prioritize!

1. Finish what I’ve started

  • Pick up the books I’ve set down and still want to get back to. I finally restarted To Each This World this month and it turned out to be really good! I also need to get back to The AI Con and The Gossamer Mage.
  • Finish series. I’ve got two books left in my Earthsea re-read, and I haven’t worked up the nerve to open The Rose Field or Parable of the Talents. There’s also Seanan McGuire’s alchemy series, of which I’ve only read Middlegame (and I probably want to re-read it before starting the next one).
  • Review all the books I’ve read this year.
  • Finish the older reviews sitting in my drafts folder.
  • Re-read and review the Les Misérables comic/manga adaptations I picked up over the last couple of years.
  • Finish at least the novels and story collections from that Le Guin bundle a couple of years ago, plus the remaining Hainish stories that aren’t in any of those collections.

(Minor update as I’ve filled in a few other books I forgot to mention.)

2. Make room

This will require coordinating with the rest of the household, but I can at least make a first pass.

  • To-read books that none of us still want to read.
  • Read books that none of us want to re-read.
  • Books that no longer spark joy, and merely spark “meh” (unless there’s another reason to hang onto them, like keeping the bad middle volume of an otherwise good series)
  • Same with my comic collection.

3. Try out some more eBook apps.

I’m mostly using NeoReader (the one built into the Boox Go 7) for DRM-free eBooks, and Kobo for books I’ve bought over the last few years. Ebooks.com has a new app that replaces their existing bare-bones app, and I’ve heard good things about ReadEra. Plus I should make the effort to really use KOReader on a couple of devices. I’ve bounced off it a couple of times, but people out there like it.

4. Cross-Post Reviews

I’ve gotten behind on cross-posting reviews to BookWyrm (which I trust enough to post the full versions) and various bookshop sites (which I don’t). But it’s worth at least rating the recent books I’ve liked by living authors at Amazon and Kobo for visibility in the Great Engines of Algorithmic Recommendation.

5. Keep up!

When I buy a newly-published book, read it while it’s still new, then go back to the to-read pile.

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Back in 2016, a Vine (remember those?) by “Gasoleen” immortalized the “FR E SH A VOCA DO” sign at a Torrance Del Taco as “Free sha-VA-ca-doo.” I hadn’t seen the video, but I had watched the sign’s letters drift apart over a few months. They even updated the logo without fixing the spacing…until they changed it to say “FREE SHAVOCADO” ASK INSIDE for the summer. That’s when I took a photo of it myself, and discovered that the Free Shavocado tag already existed on Tumblr.

I guess someone’s nostalgic for the meme, because today, roughly 10 years later, the sign once again says “FRE SH A VOCA DO.”

A square red DEL TACO sign stands on a post above two narrower signs, one with movable lettering and the other indicating that the 'DRIVE THRU' is open late. The custom sign between them reads 'FRE SH A VOCA DO'. Behind the sign it's a mottled sky, some white, some blue. A skinny tree tied to two support poles, with mostly empty branches (but a few leaves finally starting to bud), stands next to it. Cars can be seen on the road behind the signpost, and some low buildings across the way.

The other side of the sign. It's seen from a bit further away, so I used digital zoom and the image is a bit blurrier. The DEL TACO and drive-through (sorry, drive thru) signs look the same. At first it looks like the tree is missing, but it's just mostly hidden behind the signs. From this side the sky is a dull gray, and the sign reads 'FRE SH A GUACA MOLE' instead.

They put it on the opposite side this time. On the side visible in both the meme and my own older photo, they’ve put a new variation: “FRE SH A GUACA MOLE.”

Looking back at the original post, I realize I should’ve crossed the street to match the original angle (and get a clearer shot) on this one. At least I got a clear photo of the returning classic!

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Back in December 2024, Niantic posted about a large geospacial model they were building using data from Pokémon Go.

That led to a lot of online talk, with takes ranging from:

  • Well yeah, that’s what we figured they were doing with the “Scan a Pokéstop to build better AR models” feature.
    to
  • Watch out! Niantic is building a global AR model using every image that passes in front of your phone’s camera!

I was in the “of course that’s what it’s for” camp. When the game rolled out the Pokéstop scanning feature a few years earlier, it seemed obvious that it was training 3D machine vision, like how all the “pick the squares with bicycles” CAPTCHAs are obviously training for self-driving cars. I figured there was a good chance someone would use it for some harmful purpose or another, probably surveillance, so I skipped those tasks.

Anyway, after a week or so, Niantic updated the article to clarify* that it was using the deliberate Pokéstop scans in public places for Pokémon Playground, not any of the other AR features like taking a photo of your buddy in the kitchen.

This made sense, because if they were using that data, it would have eventually gotten better at placing a Pokémon in my kitchen. (The floor’s a grid. You’d think that would help, but noooo….)

Drones (And not just Beedrils or Combees)

Those scans are back in the news, because as DroneXL reports, that geospatial model is being used for camera-based drone navigation.

Including military drones.

Because of course everything has to be weaponized. Allegedly even Pixar’s RenderMan.

Admittedly, GPS itself started as a military technology long before it became civilian infrastructure. Military and civilian tech really do just have a revolving door between them, don’t they?

Training Data

Among other sources, DroneXL cites a Dutch-language article at Trouw, who asked the defense contractor (Vantor) directly whether it uses Pokémon Go data: Vantor initially said no, but later walked back any guarantee. Niantic Spatial, however, has stated that the Pokéstop scans were used to train an “early version” of their model. That means the data (or weights produced from it) is still in there, just blended so much by training process that it can’t be identified anymore.

Kind of like you probably couldn’t confirm my old blog posts are in the training data for an LLM by looking at the LLM weights, but you can find pages from hyperborea.org in Common Crawl data, and assume any model trained on Common Crawl still has it in there somewhere.

Maybe scans made since Scopely (US-based, Saudi owned) bought Niantic’s gaming division last year haven’t gone into the map built by Niantic Spatial (still independent), so Vantor technically isn’t using current player data. Or maybe Niantic Games continued passing scans along to Niantic Spatial for a while, under the separate TOS, and Vantor’s spokesperson just hadn’t made the connection.

Quietly Dropped

Curiously, the Pokéstop scanning task I’d left in my list for years just disappeared a few days ago.

At first I deleted the tasks as I got them, but every time I scanned an eligible stop it would add a new one if I didn’t have one in my list. So after a while I just left one there and ignored it like an ad banner.

It turns out Pokémon Go discontinued the features on June 2, just three days before the Trouw article was published. (New tasks stopped appearing that day, and it took a few days for old tasks to disappear.)

Coincidence? Maybe. But the timing’s certainly suspicious.

Notes

* Before Niantic published their update, I e-mailed them asking for clarification. It took them over a month, but they did eventually reply:

Hi Trainer, we appreciate your patience. Thanks for your questions about AR Mode and our Privacy Policy. I’ve shared some additional information below:

For Pokémon GO, only AR scans from the PokéStop Scanning feature will contribute to the development of the Large Geospatial Model. As noted in the PokéStop Scanning Help Article (https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-pokemon-go/faq/2519-scanning-a-pokestop/): information gathered during PokéStop Scanning allows Niantic to generate accurate, dynamic 3-D maps of real-world objects and their relative locations, and help devices understand the surroundings in AR real-time. As noted in the Editor’s note to the blog post, merely playing the game does not train an AI model.

When using AR or AR+ mode, we do not store your photos on our servers. For PokéStop Scanning, once a PokéStop scan is voluntarily uploaded, the video recording and associated camera data is retained on our servers in accordance with our data retention policies. For more information please see our Privacy Policy (https://nianticlabs.com/privacy).

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Last night the whole family got into a multiplayer Minecraft game for the first time in a while. Weirdly enough, *one* system was showing way too many materials as copper. Even stuff like snow. WTF?

Well, we realized it was after 7 PM local time, which meant on UTC time it was already April 1, so it must be this year’s April Fool’s joke for Minecraft. (Or in this case, one of the mods.) But why only on one computer?

Then it hit me: The host was a Windows machine, which means the hardware clock is set to local time (instead of being set to UTC and just displaying local time). I was connecting from a Linux box that dual-boots, so I’d long since set the hardware clock to local time so Windows wouldn’t fight with it. The one showing all copper, all the time, was a Mac, which doesn’t dual boot, and uses Unix under the hood, so its hardware was set to UTC, and it was the only computer of the three that was already running in April 1.

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