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

Trying to read a post claiming GitHub’s decision to purge toasts is *bad* for accessibility, even though it's on perennially inaccessible Medium.
And it’s behind an authwall.
Fine, I’ll sign in.
Oh, it’s actually behind a paywall.
Oh well. It’s not meant for me. Or anyone.

UpScrolled, a platform for sharing photos, videos, and text that claims political impartiality, says user growth has surged since TikTok's US takeover (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/867958/tiktok-upscrolled-app-us-takeover

TikTokers are heading to UpScrolled following US takeover
Just days after Oracle and a group of investors took over TikTok’s US operations, many users have announced they are switching to UpScrolled, an alternative social platform that promises not to shadowban or censor content.

@… following up on our chat at #SDSL2025, I finally found some time to see how a #QGIS Processing Algorithm Provider plugin can be unit tested. Here's what I've …

trajectools/tests/test_run_algs.py at main
trajectools - Trajectools - trajectory data analysis tools for the QGIS Processing toolbox | Previous home: https://github.com/movingpandas/qgis-trajectools

Just got an email from one of my Senators, Jon Ossoff, GA with some welcomed news:
Good afternoon,
On Sunday, U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff demanded civil liberties protections before further funds are appropriated to ICE and announced he will oppose the measure scheduled for a vote this week.
(Full text of letter in the image alt-text)
#UsPol

UpScrolled, a platform for sharing photos, videos, and text that claims political impartiality, says user growth has surged since TikTok's US takeover (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/867958/tiktok-upscrolled-app-us-takeover

TikTokers are heading to UpScrolled following US takeover
Just days after Oracle and a group of investors took over TikTok’s US operations, many users have announced they are switching to UpScrolled, an alternative social platform that promises not to shadowban or censor content.

In 2014, NASA awarded a Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract to Boeing to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station with its #Starliner spacecraft; as part of its contract, Boeing was awarded up to six crewed flights to the orbital complex - after a thorough evaluation, the definitive order has been adjusted to four missions, with the remaining two available as options: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/11/24/nasa-boeing-modify-commercial-crew-contract/. The next Starliner flight, known as Starliner-1, will be used by NASA to deliver necessary cargo to the orbital laboratory and allow in-flight validation of the system upgrades implemented following the Crew Flight Test mission last year - NASA and Boeing are targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 pending completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities.

The problem with Las Vegas is that visitors are now treated like marks rather than guests.
The $50 gotcha charge at Paris Las Vegas for unplugging a cord in the room to charge a laptop is a perfect example:
https://view…

“$50 Charge Because I Unplugged A Cord”: Paris Las Vegas Hotel’s Tiny Print Fee Sums Up Why Visitors Are Fleeing The City
A reader shares that the were billed "$50 to charge a laptop" at Paris Las Vegas, and they thought this was "an even more outrageous fee" than $26 for a bottle of water at Aria. Las Vegas executives can't seem to figure out why tourist visits are declining in the city.

Writing unit tests for my random number generation library continues to be difficult. My tests are failing because the bias in the distribution exceeds my expectations, but I'm wondering whether I should just repeat the test more times and permit it to exceed expectations some of the time (as long as it does it symmetrically/rarely/etc. My gut tells me that second-order expectations aren't any better than first-order expectations, but another part of me disagrees.
Thinking more as I write this (writing is thinking): second-order tests can at least give me better info to work with towards fixing things I think! So maybe I'll invest in them.
#coding

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