Tootfinder

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

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.

Arriving at Act I, The Alters is quite engaging. It's a video game, in case you are reaching for your favourite search engine. So far, the sci-fi aspect has that structured feeling of the Eastern European/Soviet branch of the genre, mixed up with the post-Soviet era shift of values and cultural trends -- still kind of bland, but looking at the Western guilty thrill of the dystopian. It's a damn good, well-made game. I hope it holds up in that way until the end.

Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others (Abram Brown/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/a

Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Add to $1.2 Billion Funding Boom for Police Tech Startups
Over the past year, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and many of Silicon Valley’s other top venture capital firms have funneled at least $1.2 billion in funding to startups selling technology to city police departments and local public safety agencies. Those companies illustrate the technology industry’s growing enthusiasm for making software and hardware for the government and law

City Spot ⭕️
城市点阵 ⭕️
📷 Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Yea I can’t imagine why anyone thought this dipshit was defending rape…I mean aside from the over half a dozen posts where he defended rape as “not immoral”, literally said “No. In fact, the word "rape"…didn't even exist until the 1800s.” and arguing that being “owned”* wasn’t “horrific”
Complete mystery why people went after him, must be some weird BlueSky thing. 😂
JFC

The treadmill desk is up and running with provisional hardware. Powered by the mini-pc that was lying around mostly unused.
The monitor can be pushed back out of the way to place a laptop on the shelf instead if needing to work on the dayjob's PC, say.
A bit cramped and unsafe feeling. Maybe needs a handle to hold on to screwed onto the door or something.
#treadmillDesk

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]

#Shitpost #Shitposting #ShamelesslyStolenFromTheFacebook

Moody Urbanity - Past 📴
情绪化城市 - 过去 📴
📷 Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite