Tootfinder

Short day today as the worker had to leave early for some sort of appointment.
Still, the hanging rails are up inside the wardrobe, the racks are up in the closet to support the adjustable shelves in there, the fixed shelves at the side of the cupboard are up.
I thought I smelled paint for a while before he left but turns out that was "wood filler", apparently filling the holes in the natural wood?
Not sure what this frame will be. Is it the edges for a panel door? Is it the start of the windowed doors for the top cupboards? Dunno.

Moonlake AI, which creates tools to "vibe code virtual worlds", including for gaming, animation, and filmmaking, comes out of stealth with a $28M seed (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivast

Gaming Worlds Could Be The Answer To AI’s Data Problem
Stanford PhDs Fan-Yun Sun and Sharon Lee cofounded AI research company Moonlake AI to help people "vibe code virtual worlds."

Moonlake AI, which offers tools to help users "vibe code virtual worlds", including for gaming, animation, and filmmaking, comes out of stealth with a $28M seed (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivast

Gaming Worlds Could Be The Answer To AI’s Data Problem
Stanford PhDs Fan-Yun Sun and Sharon Lee cofounded AI research company Moonlake AI to help people "vibe code virtual worlds."

Inferring Dynamic Physical Properties from Video Foundation Models
Guanqi Zhan, Xianzheng Ma, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02311 https://

Inferring Dynamic Physical Properties from Video Foundation Models
We study the task of predicting dynamic physical properties from videos. More specifically, we consider physical properties that require temporal information to be inferred: elasticity of a bouncing object, viscosity of a flowing liquid, and dynamic friction of an object sliding on a surface. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) We collect a new video dataset for each physical property, consisting of synthetic training and testing splits, as well as a real split for real world …

Once Welcomed, Then Scapegoated: The Enduring Consequences of Assimilation Policies in the Wake of Mass Migration
Vinicius Schuabb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02836 https://

Once Welcomed, Then Scapegoated: The Enduring Consequences of Assimilation Policies in the Wake of Mass Migration
This paper examines the short- and long-term effects of immigrant assimilation policies in Brazil following the Mass Migration period. I focus on the Nationalization Campaign, launched by the federal government amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment during the Great Depression and the two World Wars. Using newly assembled archival data spanning the twentieth century, I assess the impact of these policies on the educational outcomes of immigrants and their descendants, following the forced closure…

UN sees world's emissions falling 10% by 2035, far short of 60% goal #environment

UN sees world's emissions falling 10% by 2035, far short of 60% goal
Global emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are expected to fall by about 10% by 2035, compared with 1990 levels, representing the first decline ever forecast by the United Nations. But the world remains well off course to keeping global warming below the 1.5 C leaders committed to when they signed the Paris Agreement a decade ago.

The Trump administration is not attacking the "excesses" of "woke" scholarship. They're at war with the very idea of power analysis, with the feeling of deep empathy with the oppressed, with ethical commitment to make a just world.

The Trump administration is going to restrict the number of refugees it admits into the United States next year to the token level of just 7,500
– and those spots will mostly be filled by white South Africans.
The low number represents a dramatic drop after the US previously allowed in hundreds of thousands of people
fleeing war and persecution from around the world

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