Tootfinder

What Happened to Christa Pike Wasn’t an Anomaly.
Executioners struggled to find a vein, jabbing Pike with at least seven needles, according to her lawyers, one of whom watched in dismay.
As the caustic barbiturate finally started flowing into the IV lines, Pike did not fall into sedation quickly.
Instead, witnesses said, she sang with her spiritual adviser.
Then she said her arm felt like it was about to burst open. “Does this happen like that?” she asked. 
“Th…

Why Tennessee’s Botched Death Row Execution Could Happen Anywhere
The complications behind Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike aren’t uncommon — and show how easily another botched execution could occur, even as others are planned soon in Texas and Florida.

Just finished reading "The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi. I had already watched the anime, but it had been so king I didn't remember all the details. While the anime was great, the book is even better, and it's going to be high on my list of things to recommend to my children when they're old enough to read for fun.
The neurodivergent representation is cool, as is the deep central question of interspecies bonds and the political possibilities and dangers they entail. Uehashi handles the exploration of that question well in my judgment, including appropriate ambiguity without muddying moral clarity. Elin is a truly fantastic protagonist, not without flaws but nevertheless a excellent role model and a very sympathetic figure without being pitiful.
One thing I really love about Uehashi's writing is that she's not shy about using interior narration to tell the reader directly what a variety of characters are feeling, but when she does this she focuses on human contradictions, quirks, and weaknesses that make those characters feel much richer, and that remind the reader of all the ways our weird and sometimes contradictory or inexplicable quirks guide our actions just as much as both logical thought and predictable/expected feelings. None of the characters is an unerring source of wisdom, with every grand principle presented shown to have its weaknesses and biases, and even the wisest characters making mistakes and learning from them.
Overall, a wonderful book, and having also seen the "Seirei no Moribito" anime but not read the books, I'm excited to dig into more of Uehashi's extensive catalog.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Brian Schottenheimer Made His Feelings Crystal Clear on Cowboys Protector https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/brian-schottenheimer-feelings-clear-tyler-guyton/

#PennedPossibilities 1142: Does your MC care about vanity and their image?
Nope, they're all about procedure and regulation, and image and vanity aren't measurable metrics on their clipboard.
My side character Ventral Striatum, the Goddess of Desire, on the other hand, cares a great deal. She enjoys luxurious fabrics against her skin and feeling pretty.

Jurisdictions and agencies must do a better job of rooting out misuse of these cameras and being transparent about the policies involved. An officer who misuses an ALPR system should be fired and lose their police certification. The charges for a cop violating the public trust in this way should be felonies.
…

How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking
Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems.

Does journalism face its gravest danger yet?
Christiane Amanpour speaks to reporter Amy Goodman and filmmaker Tia Lessin, about their new documentary exploring the fight for an independent press.
Then: A powerful new exhibition imagines the life Emmett Till was denied. Historian Sarah Lewis and the Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. join the show to discuss.
And: Long before Silicon Valley dominated our lives, Paulina Borsook warned of its growing power. Michel Martin speaks to the …

RE: https://mastodon.social/@zackwhittaker/117303838723364124
This linked to a post about turning a $20 4G hotspot into a little portable linux machine w/ keyboard. This part right here almost made me feel some strong feelings...

I'm not big on the whole Christian "natural/artificial" binary, or the settler-colonialist concept of "wilderness" which erases indigenous stewardship in a bid to claim mid territory (see, e.g., tribes forced out of what are now national parks in the US). But I do enjoy getting out of urban/suburban environments and into places where the human impact on the land is minimal and/or synergistic with non-human flourishing.
I was thinking about why I enjoy this so much today while out on a stroller hike with my younger child, and came to the conclusion that it may be less about being in a "natural" space and more about being in a space whose flourishing is not tied to the capitalist necropolitical "growth" spiral.
Like, there's the baseline intrinsic beauty of flowers, trees, flowing water, etc. Then there's the pleasure of considering how these things fit together into an ecosystem and mutually support each other (and also compete/predate, etc.). But on top of all that, there's the sense that these things are part of a self-sustaining pattern that's capable of continuing without outside inputs and without creating external waste over vast, geologic timescales. The things I see when I look around in a city aren't like that. 100 or 1000 or 10000 years from now they'll be ruins, not necessarily because of human extinction or anything like that, but because the resource flows that create them are inseparable from a fundamentally unsustainable economy built around a paradoxical assumption of infinite exponential growth.
There *are* of course some human-built or -stewarded things in the world that are sustainably maintained, and ruins can have their own kind of beauty. But to me part of the joy of being on a hiking trail is to look around and see beautiful systems that will persist regardless of (most) human political outcomes that I spend a lot of energy worrying about.
Even in the extreme cases of climate change these things will eventually come back, albeit in an altered form. I don't want to ignore the incredibly destructive impact of humans on the environment, of course, but still, it's comforting to me to think about how the problems and brokenness of currently-dominant human cultures might change and scar but will not actually destroy the many systems on this planet that just don't depend on humans for their propagation.

Just finished "What Elephants Know" by Eric Dinerstein. Leaves me with very mixed feelings: it's a novel in many ways about Nepal, and I don't doubt that the author's experience living there gives him a not-insignificant window into the culture, plus there are multiple people mentioned in the acknowledgements as judging faithfulness to Nepali culture. I myself have no direct connection to the country, nor enough knowledge to see any clear inaccuracies in the writing, nor ways in which it directly disrespects the culture.
That said, my instincts say this is a portrayal of the culture and country that probably elides much about the downsides of foreign influence and the monarchy (something I naturally distrust as an anarchist). At minimum, the internal contradiction is clear between the police as an inept and dangerous institution when encountered directly, but as a clean and unproblematic way to resolve problems with criminals when the Maroons subplot needs wrapping up. This is typical of neoliberals who have begun to acknowledge the most obvious problems with police but who refuse to admit the necessity of police abolition. Furthermore, there's a strong thread of white saviorism thrown in, and a big piece of meritocracy to go along with it. This story presents only highly particular fictionalized solutions to the real structural problems facing the elephants and other animals it describes, and the solutions it imagines require reliance on institutions which are in the real world fundamentally untrustworthy.
I enjoyed learning about the ecology of the Nepali borderlands, and about the cultures surrounding elephants there, plus some of the diversity of religions and cultures that interact in the area, and the story was satisfyingly written in terms of the main character's trials and responses to them, if I disregard the issues mentioned above.
If anyone has recommendations for novels in English (including via translation) by actual Nepali authors, I'd love to hear them, as I'll be looking for that perspective to balance this one.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Just because some words diffused across language boundaries without ever getting a proper orthographic update centuries ago doesn't mean we can't fix them today.
Think I might start spelling ylama and armadiylo and such like this and just wait for them to catch on. Definitely going to be pronouncing them closer to their source languages either way.
If you speak Spanish (or Quechua) do you have feelings about this? Obviously in Spanish the llama and armadillo spellings are correct (I don't know much about Quechua orthography, but assume llama is also correct there when written in roman characters).
#linguistics #orthography