Tootfinder

Blocking the work of MSF is absolutely depraved. Israel continues to fumble its way out of the community of civilized nations.
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-hamas-palestinians-ceasefire-war-news-286106d7a5a911704cdcf1c93…

Israel to halt operations of several humanitarian groups in Gaza starting in 2026
Israel says it will suspend several humanitarian organizations for failing to meet its new rules to vet international organizations working in Gaza. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs said on Tuesday that the organizations that will be banned on Jan. 1 did not meet its new requirements for sharing staff, funding and operations information. It accused Doctors Without Borders, known as MSF by its French acronym, of failing to clarify the roles of some staff that Israel accused of cooperation with H…

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

I just finished Guild Wars: Prophecies. It took me 19.5 years.
I created my first character way back when the game was new, but I never finished the campaign. The upcoming Reforged update got me interested again. Together with a friend and 3 very friendly strangers we played through the remaining 3 missions.
From boss tactics to tounge-in-cheek comments about the dated cutscenes It was just the perfect MMO game night for me.

SEC filing: Snowflake says an executive shared unauthorized financial guidance with an Instagram influencer; an Oct. 26 video interview features CRO Mike Gannon (Alice Tecotzky/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/influencer-inte…

An influencer's interview with Snowflake's CRO triggered an 8K filing
Mike Gannon said that Snowflake will end the year with just over $4.5 billion in revenue and that "we're getting to $10 billion in a couple of years."

As a non-binary person living in #Bergen, #Norway, this video made me cry from pure euphoria, a wave of relief knowing I am seen just as I am.
I hope it brings you the same confidence and happiness, showing that you are truly seen and celebrated for who you are.

A college freshman trying to fly from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving
was instead deported to Honduras
in violation of a court order, according to her attorney.
Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19,
had already passed through security at Boston Logan International Airport on Nov. 20
when she was told there was an issue with her boarding pass,
said attorney Todd Pomerleau.
The Babson College student was then detained by immigration off…

College freshman deported flying home for Thanksgiving surprise
A college freshman trying to fly from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving was deported to Honduras in violation of a court order. That's according to an attorney for Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old at Babson College. She was detained by immigration officials at Boston Logan International Airport on November 20. A federal judge issued an emergency order the day after her arrest prohibiting the government from removing her from Massachusetts for 72 hours. However, withi…

"When I hear international leaders speak of “Israel’s right to defend itself,” I wonder: against whom? Against mothers with their babies? Against teachers with their board markers? Against students with their books? The global silence — or worse, complicity — amplifies our grief" -- Dr Hassan El-Nabih

‘I’m happy and sad to see you’: The paradox of surviving the Gaza genocide
A chance encounter with one of my past students at the Islamic University of Gaza highlighted the paradox of surviving the Gaza genocide: feeling joy in surviving the war and sorrow in witnessing what our survival has cost us.

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’
In a brief video in English, the French filmmakers Élodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos introduce their documentary ‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’ (Arte, 2022). It can be watched here.

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

Porn has long been a proving ground for new technology.
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century it was quickly deployed to print bawdy pamphlets.
Adult films were put on video in 1977, a year before mainstream Hollywood ones,
and dominated sales for some time.
When Minitel, a French precursor to the internet, was launched in the early 1980s, erotic services initially accounted for between one-third and a half of all traffic.
I…