@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-27 03:00:46
Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-09-26 19:14:21
Really silly dream
I had a really silly #dream recently. I dreamt that my CFL broke. Or more specifically, it kept trying to turn out, successive parts of it were lighting up, then it all went off and tried again. And it looked like it had a bunch of cuts across it, and around these cuts little thunder sparks started appearing, like some kind of STALKER-like anomaly.
I finally flipped the switch, but the anomaly remained, and I wanted to get rid of it in case the sparks could jump onto my hardware and damage something. So I threw a metal bowl towards it, supposing the thunder would jump onto it. While it was flying near the anomaly, it slowed down and started turning back like a boomerang. On top of that, pieces of cat food (don't ask me why I threw a full bowl) were getting out of it and staying in the air levitating. When the bowl reached the floor and started turning again, Mr Ek came close to it and started levitating himself; he was sitting a few centimeters above the floor.
In the middle of all this, I've figured out I should record it. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, before I managed to switch to recording video.
Once I've recorded the fascinating flying bowls and levitating cat food, I needed to go back to discharging the thing. I threw a second metal bowl, and that one started levitating as well. I've figured out that's stupid, and I've found some big ass hammer with a metal end and a wooden handle. I held the end near the lamp to charge it, then tried to find something to discharge it to. I've tried some small stuff like the door handle, but obviously that wasn't sufficient. Finally, I've figured out to use the electricity box, since it is grounded. I held the hammer to it, watching sparks light the semi-darkness; I've recorded that as well.
And that's how much of it I remember.
@cdarwin@c.im2025-10-27 01:30:04
We distinguish "personal unfairness",
-- the view that one’s own economic situation is unfair,
from "social unfairness",
-- the view that the economic situation of others in society is unfair.
Uncertainties associated with the transition to a globalized knowledge economy heighten people’s feelings of personal unfairness
Feelings of personal unfairness increase support for the "populist right"
and feelings about social unfairn…
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2025-09-27 08:00:04
sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 180 nodes and 45047 edges.
Tags: Soc…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-27 18:25:43
Filing: iRobot says its last potential buyer withdrew from the process and its financials remain dire, following Amazon abandoning a 2024 bid; IRBT drops 33% (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/irobot-stock-roomba.html
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2025-10-27 15:00:03
sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 180 nodes and 45047 edges.
Tags: Soc…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-09-26 17:02:50
Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors
@cdarwin@c.im2025-09-26 16:49:00
The indictment of former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey
was just two pages long and contained so little detail that it was hard for legal experts to assess its merits.
Some former government lawyers, as well as prominent Democrats, said the case appeared so flimsy that it was likely to fail.
Some Republicans also expressed concerns
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2025-11-26 14:00:04
sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 126 nodes and 28561 edges.
Tags: Soc…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-10-26 21:51:11
Elizabeth Warren here — Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan told me I could reach out, because this is important.
Peggy is the partner I need to get things done in the Senate,
that’s why I have officially endorsed her campaign.
I know she will be a champion for Minnesotans in Congress.
Can you please pitch in $5 or anything you can to help power her campaign?
I’ll explain more below about why this is such a critical race.
