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 snow started falling in Bergen, Norway, so I pulled on my winter fit. ❄️❤️🖤
#Snow #Bergen #Norway

Sources: Bengaluru-based quick grocery delivery startup Zepto confidentially files for a ~$1.3B India IPO; Zepto raised $450M at a $7B valuation in October 2025 (Pranav Mukul/The Economic Times)
https://economi…

Zepto makes confidential filing with Sebi for $1.3 billion IPO: sources
The listing is planned for the July-September quarter of 2026. In October, the quick commerce major had closed a $450 million round, valuing it at $7 billion. As of late November, Zepto had around Rs 7,000 crore in cash, while competitors Eternal and Swiggy each have around Rs 17,000-18,000 crore on their books currently.

No, @…, emphasizing the safety of vaccines is not a strawman. For everlasting fuck’s sake.
Come back to planet Earth, where:
- scare-mongering about vaccines is running rampant,
- right-wing propaganda is intentionally fueling that fear for profiteering and political gain,
- parents are very clearly afraid of the vaccines themselves right now,
- diseases like measles are making a return because of that fear, and
- people are dying as a result.
Your post is a non-sequitur. Whatever stick you have up your butt about lockdowns or whatever this post was about, please keep that stick in your butt and out of vaccine safety discussions. https://mastodon.online/@dennmans/115631732594437886

Moody Urbanity - Stand 🧍‍♂️
情绪化城市 - 立 🧍‍♂️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

3 days ago the RSS feed of planet.ubuntu.com stopped working due to a TLS cert error.
I THINK it's due to them overhauling & moving it to a github-hosted replacement, but as this was done just by redirecting DNS the new host doesn't have a TLS cert with the correct name. If so, this means that people following the old RSS feed can't do so any more and they got no notice that this was going to happen.
I don't know for sure though because my query remains unansw…

So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

This basic science advance was made with a rocket sled. (And math.) But rocket sleds are FUN!
#Science #PlanetaryScience #RocketSled

Mysterious State of Matter Discovered Flowing Inside Earth's Core
By firing tiny projectiles of iron-carbon alloy from a high-speed cannon, scientists have finally demonstrated that a weird part-solid, …

The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation plans to gradually cut 900 jobs to help it save $334M by 2029 as it faces a lower license fee and falling commercial revenues (SWI swissinfo.ch)
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/swiss-broadcasting-corpo…

Swiss Broadcasting Corporation confirms plan to cut 900 jobs by 2029
Under the ongoing restructuring process, 900 full-time equivalent job cuts are planned, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) confirmed.

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

iRobot stock tumbles 33% after Roomba maker warns the search for a buyer has stalled
The Roomba maker's financial condition has worsened since Amazon abandoned its planned acquisition of the company in 2024.