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

The indictment of former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey
was just two pages long and contained so little detail that it was hard for legal experts to assess its merits.
Some former government lawyers, as well as prominent Democrats, said the case appeared so flimsy that it was likely to fail.
Some Republicans also expressed concerns

Brief Comey Indictment Prompts Questions and Criticism
The two-page indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, offered little indication of the evidence that would be presented at a trial. Some legal experts called it flimsy and dangerous.

Really silly dream
I had a really silly #dream recently. I dreamt that my CFL broke. Or more specifically, it kept trying to turn out, successive parts of it were lighting up, then it all went off and tried again. And it looked like it had a bunch of cuts across it, and around these cuts little thunder sparks started appearing, like some kind of STALKER-like anomaly.
I finally flipped the switch, but the anomaly remained, and I wanted to get rid of it in case the sparks could jump onto my hardware and damage something. So I threw a metal bowl towards it, supposing the thunder would jump onto it. While it was flying near the anomaly, it slowed down and started turning back like a boomerang. On top of that, pieces of cat food (don't ask me why I threw a full bowl) were getting out of it and staying in the air levitating. When the bowl reached the floor and started turning again, Mr Ek came close to it and started levitating himself; he was sitting a few centimeters above the floor.
In the middle of all this, I've figured out I should record it. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, before I managed to switch to recording video.
Once I've recorded the fascinating flying bowls and levitating cat food, I needed to go back to discharging the thing. I threw a second metal bowl, and that one started levitating as well. I've figured out that's stupid, and I've found some big ass hammer with a metal end and a wooden handle. I held the end near the lamp to charge it, then tried to find something to discharge it to. I've tried some small stuff like the door handle, but obviously that wasn't sufficient. Finally, I've figured out to use the electricity box, since it is grounded. I held the hammer to it, watching sparks light the semi-darkness; I've recorded that as well.
And that's how much of it I remember.

HyperTASR: Hypernetwork-Driven Task-Aware Scene Representations for Robust Manipulation
Li Sun, Jiefeng Wu, Feng Chen, Ruizhe Liu, Yanchao Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18802 …

HyperTASR: Hypernetwork-Driven Task-Aware Scene Representations for Robust Manipulation
Effective policy learning for robotic manipulation requires scene representations that selectively capture task-relevant environmental features. Current approaches typically employ task-agnostic representation extraction, failing to emulate the dynamic perceptual adaptation observed in human cognition. We present HyperTASR, a hypernetwork-driven framework that modulates scene representations based on both task objectives and the execution phase. Our architecture dynamically generates representa…

Concrete Jungle 🏗️
水泥丛林 🏗️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

When Instructions Multiply: Measuring and Estimating LLM Capabilities of Multiple Instructions Following
Keno Harada, Yudai Yamazaki, Masachika Taniguchi, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21051

When Instructions Multiply: Measuring and Estimating LLM Capabilities of Multiple Instructions Following
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to real-world scenarios, it becomes crucial to understand their ability to follow multiple instructions simultaneously. To systematically evaluate these capabilities, we introduce two specialized benchmarks for fundamental domains where multiple instructions following is important: Many Instruction-Following Eval (ManyIFEval) for text generation with up to ten instructions, and Style-aware Mostly Basic Programming Problems (StyleMBPP) for…

Geno Smith sends message to Raiders fans following middle finger incident https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/geno-smith-sends-message-raiders-fans-following-middle-fin…

love when a trans woman's completely culturally disconnected from cis women due to muh anxiety or whatever, yet inevitably pushed with the same tides due to being a woman in the same circumstances, so she winds up repeating mainstream instagram feminist platitudes as if they were fresh, but with the word "trans" tacked on for no reason. "if you're a trans woman you need to learn how to trust your gut feeling on things"

'Eisige Zeiten' #FotoVorschlag 'icy times'
Oh I have a couple of frosty photos, but this might be one of my best. I spent quite a while there to capture the cold feeling.
Packed in multiple layers, I really spent quite a while around that spot in order to really see the right motives.
It just reminds me that I could post more of my winter photos! :)
…

I haven’t seen anyone talk about how Jane Doe
- an Epstein survivor
- just sued the Bank of New York Mellon
for funding Epstein and failing to file a Suspicious Activity Report
A Mellon heir is the one who gave $130M to pay the troops.
Seems bribey to me.
https://bsky.app/pro…

Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.com)
I haven’t seen anyone talk about how Jane Doe - an Epstein survivor - just sued the Bank of New York Mellon for funding Epstein and failing to file a Suspicious Activity Report. A Mellon heir is the one who gave $130M to pay the troops. Seems bribey to me.