Tootfinder

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

The first rider, Nicolas Chatelet, has crossed all of Spain and is now entering France.
https://www2.followmychallenge.com/live/tcrno11/?lat=43.342627&lng=-1.786442&z=12.92&b=0&p=0

Transcontinental Race No11 // #TCRNo11 2025
Follow riders as they race across Europe, beginning in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and ending in Constanta, Romania

Rewatching the 1984 film version of 1984, as I haven't seen it since high school. They showed it to us in class in the 90s. Been a lot of years. John Hurt ftw
#film

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

I'm not the target audience, but that second paragraph hit me in the gut
"But for many of us, the first real injustices that mattered to us, that ripped our hearts out, weren't the failings of our parents' relationships, or the boys we crushed on who didn't love us, but the Black girls who we wanted to see us and be- friend us instead either ignored or bullied us."

"The Wager-a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder", by David Grann. You get exactly the history lesson you expect: the hardship of life at sea in the 18th century, the lack of medical understanding, and the collapse of civil behaviour under life-threatening situations. And the incredible survival of some of the crew, and the following courtmarshall.
#book

wow cool did Sentry just fucking HALF the spans included in our plan!?
gotta love when a company introduces a feature you never asked for and doubles the price on a feature you care about
cool cool cool, no action required indeed

Micah Parsons details disappointment behind Packers, Cowboys tie, thanks QB Jordan Love

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/micah-parsons-details…

Probing the extent of WASP-52 b's atmosphere. High-resolution observations and 3D modeling insights
F. Nail, A. Oklop\v{c}i\'c, M. MacLeod, K. Baka, S. Czesla, E. Nagel, D. Linssen, J. Matthijsse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20572

Probing the extent of WASP-52 b's atmosphere. High-resolution observations and 3D modeling insights
WASP-52 b is an inflated hot Jupiter with a large Roche lobe filling fraction, positioned in the hot Neptune desert. Previous in-transit observations of the helium triplet at 10833 A have reported a range of excess absorption values (1.5%-5.5%) and a lack of net blueshift relative to the planet's rest frame, distinguishing it from other escaping atmospheres. This study investigates the extent and morphology of material escaping from WASP-52 b, assessing whether its outflow resembles a stream-li…

🧁 Tiny sugars in the brain disrupt emotional circuits, fueling depression
#brain

Tiny sugars in the brain disrupt emotional circuits, fueling depression
Depression is a serious disorder that disrupts daily life through lethargy, sleep disturbance, and social withdrawal, and also increases the risk of suicide. The number of depression patients has steadily increased over the years, affecting more than 280 million people worldwide as of 2025. Now, researchers have uncovered a new pathological mechanism that could provide clues for the diagnosis and treatment of depression.

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