It looks like traveling and trying to send a weekly newsletter don’t always go too well together. After California I spent a weekend at home before going to Philadelphia for MAPACA, my only concession to freelance work. It was fun seeing people in person—some I hadn’t seen since before 2020 and some I’d met only through a screen. And I may have been talked into coauthoring a presentation on slop machines, design, and queer identities at next year’s conference—I’ll have to dust off my old academic brain again.

After a couple more days in New York, I took the NextGen Acela back to Boston. It’s still no Frecciarossa, and Connecticut is still a slog, but I found the train pretty comfortable—and who doesn’t love that new-train smell?

Notes and links

You’d think I’d have more after three weeks, but you’d be wrong.

• 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, by Raymond Biesinger

  An illustrator’s illustrated memoir.

• How to disable Google’s slop machine on all the things

  Do yourself (and everyone else) a favor.

• How to build URLs with text fragments

  A somewhat recent, convoluted, unreliable browser feature I didn’t know about.

• iOS 26.1 is here, and I have notes

  There’s never been a design problem that a new toggle couldn’t fix.

• How to turn Liquid Glass into a solid interface

  Toggles! That’s how.