Tootfinder

Opt-in global Mastodon full text search. Join the index!

No exact results. Similar results found.
@AimeeMaroux@mastodon.social
2025-08-22 07:16:14
Content warning:

Have a beautiful Day of Aphrodite aka Venus' Day aka Frigg's Day aka Friday 🌹
"The fourth star is that of Venus, Lucifer by name. Some say it is Juno's. In many tales it is recorded that it is called Hesperus, too. It seems to be the largest of all stars."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2.4
🏛 Detail of #Venus in the Planetarium mosaic
📸 Daniel Gonzšlez Acuñ…

Mosaic of the bust of Venus inside a circle. She wears a golden crown, her dark hair flowing over her shoulders. She wears a golden necklace with a rectangular gemstone in the middle.
@cowboys@darktundra.xyz
2025-09-20 20:36:13

Cowboys’ Matt Eberflus Has Blunt Message for Bears Before Week 3 Game heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-co]

@castarco@hachyderm.io
2025-11-16 12:05:17
Content warning: "long" rant about american sci-fi tv series and "neuro-archy"

I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2025-11-13 04:12:01

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/

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-10-27 03:00:46

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

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2025-09-30 13:10:51

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)
techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/a-ye

@roland@devdilettante.com
2025-11-12 15:37:02

"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.”

@arXiv_mathDS_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-10-10 08:59:19

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

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.

@UP8@mastodon.social
2025-09-12 02:13:52

One last running photo for today -- I'll post a few more of my best tomorrow and hopefully a link to my Behance with more, counting down 25 1/2 hours to Caturday
#photo #photography #running

Man with black curly hair is flying with both feet off the ground and his left thumb (your right up) while a volunteer in shorts and a white sweatshirt looks off the left of the frame and a barely visible volunteer holds a red flag to stop a black car by a safety cone.