Tootfinder

For any of my comrades who are using SNAP, I wish I had something better to say than "if you crush 4 buckeyes with a hammer and tie the pulp in a sock you can wash a good sized load of laundry." English Ivy also has saponins, but I've never been able to make soap from it myself.
Ivy is everywhere. Buckeyes (Horse Chestnuts) are common in city parks (there are a ton in Seattle).
Yucca is also a good source of saponins, but it also has silica. That makes it a good scrubby soap. You can find these plants all over they're pretty common to find in yards.
If you can find acorns still (it's a bit late, but who knows), acorn grits are great and something you can survive on for a bit. Acorns need processing (it's easy to look up, but feel free to ask or check out one or Black Forager's videos on it).
If you've been following me for a bit, you probably already know all this. But if you don't, I hope it helps.
Any other forager folks are welcome to drop hints here that might be useful to folks in the city.
#Foraging

CBS has cut two streaming shows, disbanded its race and culture unit, eliminated the Johannesburg bureau; all eight on-air correspondents cut were women (Justin Baragona/The Independent)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cbs-news-l…

CBS News fired 8 on-air personalities in latest layoffs under new leader Bari Weiss. All of them are women
EXCLUSIVE: Multiple sources told The Independent that senior foreign correspondent Debora Patta was added to the layoff list following a last-minute change by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

From my LinkedIn post: “Telling your dev team to use AI coding tools is like telling your 2010 ops team to use AWS. They didn’t know how to code, they were ticket and click-it VMware people… developers who don’t have product management mindset or have never managed a dev team will fail by trying to micromanage the output of the tool rather than specifying the outcome of the product and managing the agent team to deliver that outcome.”

Back in 2010 when we first started using AWS to run Netflix, the AWS services were very incomplete, somewhat unreliable, had scaling issues, but were super fast to provision compared to filing… | Adrian Cockcroft
Back in 2010 when we first started using AWS to run Netflix, the AWS services were very incomplete, somewhat unreliable, had scaling issues, but were super fast to provision compared to filing tickets and waiting for data center ops teams to do what we need. We worked around the issues, built a new cloud native developer driven architecture and scaled Netflix at speed. At the time many people said we were crazy to run a large enterprise on cloud and would be back in datacenters when it failed. …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Cate Le Bon:
🎵 Heaven Is No Feeling
#CateLeBon
https://catelebon.bandcamp.com/track/heaven-is-no-feeling
https://open.spotify.com/track/0O2xM3g14PLmfp5xKoBnkA

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis on Oct. 9 ordered “visible identification” that is “prominently displayed.”
But dozens of photographs of uniformed immigration agents shot by Chicago Sun-Times photojournalists in four separate locations since the court order show how the feds have fallen short.
The 80-plus photos show that not all officers are displaying a visible identification code that mixes numbers and letters during some of the most contentious recent immigration actions that…

IDs are mismatched, illegible — or still missing three weeks after judge’s order to immigration officers
In dozens of photographs at four locations, Chicago Sun-Times photojournalists documented federal officers failing to wear the “visible identification” needed to hold individuals accountable during the ongoing immigration “blitz.”

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

US to cut some troops on NATO's eastern flank, Romania says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/29/us-to-cut-some-troops.html

In other news: I successfully ripped my CD collection and put them on a USB stick so I can finally use them in my car. I don't have that many yet, it was only about 20 discs.
There is a strange feeling of properness when you're listening to music that you physically own. Even more so if you know that the signal you're hearing was actually physically read off the disc in your room.
Buy used CDs guys. They're cheap. It's fun.

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 7:
Lauren Beukes ("rhymes with mucus" as she likes to say)
SciFi novellist, filmmaker, journalist and LGBTQ-ally from S.Africa.
I loved Zoo City, Moxyland and The Shining Girls and I need to catch up on her newer ones. It was fun to meet her at the Edinburgh Int'l Book Festival a few years ago.

'Engulfed in flames' — Ukraine strikes Russia's railway infrastructure, fuel tanks, HUR source says, releases video: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/28/engulfed-in-flames-ukraine-strikes.html