Tootfinder

I’ve seen posts about how Democratic politicians have to be “punished” and then they’ll shape up — even one horrifying post basically arguing that we need a couple more years for fascism to fully materialize in order to reform our political system.
My dude…this “people will wake up when it’s bad enough” trope doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It’s been failing spectacularly my whole life — and if one Trump term didn’t do it…what will? And how many people’s lives will be destroyed along the way?
That thinking will kill us all.
4/

"Iyengar told me she isn’t worried about Musk ruining D&D.
Musk is welcome to waste his money on “trying to make everyone play the version of D&D that he thinks should exist in the world,” Iyengar said. “That’s never been how that works. Everyone will play it how they want, or they’ll play something else.”
https://

Mean dimension and rate-distortion function revisited
Rui Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08051 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08051

Mean dimension and rate-distortion function revisited
Around the mean dimensions and rate-distortion functions, using some tools from local entropy theory this paper establishes the following main results: $(1)$ We prove that for non-ergodic measures associated with almost sure processes, the mean Rényi information dimension coincides with the information dimension rate. This answers a question posed by Gutman and Śpiewak (in Around the variational principle for metric mean dimension, \emph{Studia Math.} \textbf{261}(2021) 345-360). $(2)$ We…

In my case, close but not a nation.
Flying Spaghetti Monster.
https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3m76ujdjoy22l
alt: Current GOP
[…] how many members of each of the following groups do you think are more loyal to a forei…

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social)
losing my mind at the 25% of GOP voters who think most Italian Americans are "more loyal to a foreign country than to the United States." [contains quote post or other embedded content]

This summer, Mikhail Loshchinin set out for Russia on a motorcycle with German plates, reaching the border in Latvia on July 1.
At the Ubylinka checkpoint on the Russian side, he presented his Russian passport.
According to his mother, Olga, he didn’t use his Belgian passport because of the urgency of the trip and to avoid needing a visa.
Russian border guards examined Loshchinin’s phone and likely discovered his many contacts in Ukraine.
After holding him for several…

Belgian-Russian dual citizen charged with treason after trying to visit father in St. Petersburg following a heart attack
A 48-year-old man with dual Russian and Belgian citizenship has been charged with treason in Russia following an attempt to visit his father, who recently suffered a heart attack. Mikhail Loshchinin’s family is scattered across Europe. He has lived in Germany for the past several years, working as a database administrator in Luxembourg. His mother is in Poland, his father is in St. Petersburg, and his sister is a Ukrainian citizen. Mikhail also has many friends in Ukraine, i…

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

Chipmaker Cerebras Systems raised a $1.1B Series G from Fidelity, Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital, and others at an $8.1B post-money valuation ahead of its planned IPO (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/a-year-…

A year after filing to IPO, still-private Cerebras Systems raises $1.1B | TechCrunch
Cerebras initially filed to go public in September 2024 but ran into several regulatory delays due to foreign investments.

Urbanity - Cloud Four ☁️
城市化 - 四云 ☁️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford Pan 100
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

NOAA hurricane hunters flying aboard a P-3 Orion aircraft ("Kermit") are monitoring Hurricane Melissa as most aircraft steer clear. The storm poses a catastrophic threat to Jamaica and Haiti.
The crew are among the many federal workers working without pay during the US government shutdown.
https://

Jeremy Hsu (@jeremyhsu.bsky.social)
NOAA hurricane hunters flying aboard a P-3 Orion aircraft ("Kermit") are monitoring Hurricane Melissa as most aircraft steer clear. The storm poses a catastrophic threat to Jamaica and Haiti. The crew are among the many federal workers working without pay during the US government shutdown.

Moody Urbanity - Somewhere 🔲
情绪化城市 - 某处 🔲
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite