Tootfinder

How "porno-troll" Strike 3, owner of porn production company Vixen, made millions by filing copyright suits accusing users of illegally downloading its videos (Tarpley Hitt/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interact…

Everyone with a digital existence needs to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Cory Doctorow is on fire. His fluency is astounding - a 'gattling gun of jaw-dropping moments'.

How "porno-troll" Strike 3, owner of porn production company Vixen, made millions by filing copyright suits accusing users of illegally downloading its videos (Tarpley Hitt/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interact…

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
[Servalan's office. The intercom chimes]
SERVALAN: [Into intercom] Yes, Travis?
TRAVIS: [Face appears on intercom screen visible next to Servalan] We found his ship - it looks to have crashed and blown up.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/203/328 B7B…

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 January wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles forced the state to spend billions in disaster aid
-- and delay tax filings for LA residents.
The cost of Medi-Cal,
the state-run health insurance program for low-income residents, ballooned to $6 billion more than anticipated.
Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff policies rocked the stock market,
which California heavily relies on for tax revenue.
And the state lodged a flurry of lawsuits again…

Your one-minute guide to California’s budget outlook this year
Spoiler alert: California’s deficit grows, uncertainty looms, and state leaders may have fewer options than before to tackle it.

Running my own full-service, multi-tenanted & multi-domain email service gives me a remarkable feeling of power. It's is seriously cool (been running 4 of them for a bunch of years). In other news, Mailcow is superb - . https://mailcow.email/ (I run their Dockerized install)

Donald Trump followed through on his threats to sue the BBC over its editing of his remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.
The following can be attributed to Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):
“If any ordinary person filed as many frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits as Donald Trump, they’d be sanctioned and placed on a restricted filers list.
By my count, Trump has demanded at least $65 billion in damages from media outlets i…

Trump’s BBC lawsuit is nonsense, like his others
His frivolous damages theory concedes that Trump views the presidency as a for-profit venture

Dang it all. The dryer at our holiday accommodation appears to have, bizarrely, melted the zip (just a small section, but enough) on my Cactus shorts... and now I'm perpetually flying low. These are my 90% of days-type clothing in summer. Sigh. Luckily, I'll be able to take them in for repairs shortly... assuming I can find something to wear while they're at the shop.

Welp, after a day or two of fermentation and a few hours preparing the accompaniments, like the potato filling, the 'gunpowder' to sprinkle over it, and both tomato and coconut chutneys (all made from scratch, even involving cracking a fresh coconut!), I've made my first ever dosas. I'm quite chuffed by the result. It's a lot of work for a one-off...