Tootfinder

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #90TEEN
Joyce Manor:
🎵 Falling in Love Again
#JoyceManor
https://joycemanor.bandcamp.com/track/falling-in-love-again
https://open.spotify.com/track/2M0IWOmIi079R1MaPVlOW3

The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/29/the-organists-improvising-soundtracks-to-silent-films

The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films
Early on, movies had no sound, but musicians provided live accompaniment. The tradition continues, Alex Ross reports.

I’ve fallen in love with the Japanese literary form, zuihitsu.
Zuihitsu, meaning “following the brush,” flow as the mind flows. They are fragmentary—mixing moments of observation, opinion, anecdote, asides, and humor. From the contemporary point of view zuihitsu refuse categorization, vibrating in the live space between prose and poetry.
#poetry

Ways of Seeing: Following the Brush - Zuihitsu as Attention
Zuihitsu, a Japanese literary genre between prose and poetry, is a unique form of attention. Sei Shonagōn and Kimiko Hahn inspire exercises in looking.

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

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

PCIe / FPGA folks: the ThunderScope people are chasing a strange issue where the TS PCIe card appears to work properly on AMD hosts (even with fairly long lossy channels like OCuLink cables or >1 foot riser ribbons) but is failing to train the link at all (i.e. not even coming up as gen1 x1) on Intel hosts.
Ideas on root cause / fixes? I haven't scoped the training yet, as soon as I get an updated unit in my lab I will.

@… love your Clacks! Left a bunch of "Nett hier. Aber waren Sie schon mal in Ankh-Morpork? Stickers" on top of it as a token if my appreciation. #39c3 #Discworld

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

Partly bright and sunny, but fully cold and with generous amounts of wind. “Brisk” doesn’t even begin to do it justice. Still, I am a freak and love this weather. It felt good to be out moving. #TeamShorts of course.
Walked briefly twice to bring my HR down a bit and then stopped to mug at this beautiful Great Blue Heron looking for their lunch. 🐟

I'm sitting at Zurich Airport waiting to pick someone up. Next to me sits a German person who has propped up their iPad on their suitcase. They are in a video conference with several people from banks and legal, discussing tax "optimization" from Germany by buying real estate in different US states and pretending to live elsewhere. On loudspeaker.
"Don't make a bank account, don't change your drivers license. We have checklists we can provide you."

When people tell me "Why do you only listen to such old-fashioned music, your taste in music is hopelessly outdated!", I send them these 3 pictures