Tootfinder

No, @…, emphasizing the safety of vaccines is not a strawman. For everlasting fuck’s sake.
Come back to planet Earth, where:
- scare-mongering about vaccines is running rampant,
- right-wing propaganda is intentionally fueling that fear for profiteering and political gain,
- parents are very clearly afraid of the vaccines themselves right now,
- diseases like measles are making a return because of that fear, and
- people are dying as a result.
Your post is a non-sequitur. Whatever stick you have up your butt about lockdowns or whatever this post was about, please keep that stick in your butt and out of vaccine safety discussions. https://mastodon.online/@dennmans/115631732594437886

Long but very good:
"An essay on wank"
It names and identifies one of my least favorite genre of posts – finally I have a proper term for it!
I'm sure I've been guilty of it too in the past, so it's useful for self-regulation, too.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_

The Trump administration is not attacking the "excesses" of "woke" scholarship. They're at war with the very idea of power analysis, with the feeling of deep empathy with the oppressed, with ethical commitment to make a just world.

📢 Brigitte Bardot im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben
Die französische Filmikone Brigitte Bardot ist tot. Die frühere Schauspielerin sei im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben, teilte ihre Stiftung mit. Seit den 1970er-Jahren hatte sich Bardot vor allem für den Tierschutz eingesetzt.
➡️ https://w…

Brigitte Bardot im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben
Die französische Filmikone Brigitte Bardot ist tot. Die frühere Schauspielerin sei im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben, teilte ihre Stiftung mit. Seit den 1970er-Jahren hatte sich Bardot vor allem für den Tierschutz eingesetzt.

Ah, a free update on the state of the legacy IP address market, from a spammer:
Subject: Spanish IPs ranges available
We currently have a very competitive offer on IP sales, with the following prices:
• €27/IP for ranges from /24 to /22
• €26/IP for ranges of /21 and larger

We’re at a point where these sorts of simple genetic disorders are going to be falling to CRISPR-Cas9 treatments one after another in an accelerating fashion until we run out of targets.
They raise troubling questions about access to care and cost. Ask why we still have people with active Sickle Cell disease, years after the CURE was demonstrated.
The reason is that no one is stepping up with the megabuck per patient. @…

I think it's time to crack out the daylight lamp. I'm not feeling low - stressed to the eyeballs but not flat - but I do feel like I haven't woken up yet and I've been at work for two hours 😄 My daylight lamp was about £25 and it's been money very well spent. I use it as the light on in the room when I'm getting ready in the morning, rather than sitting staring at it for 20 minutes, and it just works.

Voll der Luxus: tagsüber im Kino sitzen. Ich bin ein paar Tage in Wien und habe nun vier Filme bei der Viennale gesehen.
Elements of Balance ist eine etwas konzeptlose Naturdoku ohne roten Faden mit schönen Bildern und einigen Statements von Naturschützer:innen.
Magic Farm handelt von einer in Argentinien gestrandeten Filmcrew aus NYC. Sehr amüsant, guter Plot, coole Musik, klasse Schauspieler - empfehlenswert!

goh
https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/politiek/artikel/5546865/flinke-tegenvaller-voor-boeren-en-minister-wiersma-uitzondering

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