Tootfinder

"Whenever anyone asks me for advice, I tell them: we don’t realize how deeply the nine-to-five fractures us. The weekends, the holidays, the fixed friend group—whatever rigidness exists in your behavior will exist in your perception, and it will exist in your ability to think critically."
Victoria Brugger, "Last Words of an Ego on Death Row"

Last Words of an Ego on Death Row
Hello.I don’t know who you are. But I hope we meet in the next pages—across whichever dimension I had to cross to embody these feelings.This is not a book. It is not a journal.It is the autopsy of an ego and the birth certificate of the woman I am today.It carries the blueprints I bled for: how to build something from nothing, how to love yourself when the mirror is a battlefield, how to decode the nature of existence and drag purpose out of the dark.But more than all of that—this is my b…

Sources: AI video startup Runway is looking to raise ~$500M at a $5B pre-money valuation; rival Luma AI aims to raise $1.1B at a $3.2B pre-money valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/runway-luma-talks-mul…

Runway, Luma in Talks for Multibillion-Dollar Fundraises as Revenue Picks Up
Startups that use artificial intelligence to make videos for Hollywood studios and amateur filmmakers are getting thirsty for more capital. Runway, a startup that has cut deals with Lionsgate and AMC Networks, is in talks with investors to raise around $500 million at a valuation of at least $5 ...

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

"A paper published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed drug seizures by law enforcement in San Francisco and concluded that such interdictions were associated with an increase in fatal overdoses in the surrounding area the next day."
Mayor Lurie's #WarOnDrugs 2.0 is not just failing, it's actively killing people. Public health requires m…

@samsabin.bsky.social has the scoop on Jen Easterly's new gig. And huge shout out to Huntress.
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-fu

𝕮𝖆𝖙𝖚𝖗𝖉𝖆𝖞 𝕾𝖕𝖊𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝕰𝖉𝖎𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓: Three adorbs cats in my neighborhood (sounds like I'm posting to NextDoor!)
#cats #photo #photography

Senator Murphy:
It’s pretty wild that the corruption is so brazen, is so transparent.
Vought sent out this tweet yesterday saying, I’m canceling energy projects in the following states, and listed the states.
And every single one of them is a state represented by two Democratic senators.
And the one Democratic senator who voted for the Republican continuing resolution
—that senator’s state wasn’t on the list.
So, you know, it’s just there for everybody to s…

Transcript: Chris Murphy’s Dark and Unnerving New Warning about Trump
The Democratic Senator has taken the lead in drawing attention to Trump’s authoritarianism. In an interview, he offers a stark new warning that should galvanize his fellow Democrats before it’s too late.

Asymptotic behavior of the least energy solutions to the Choquard equation in dimension two
Jinkai Gao, Xinfu Li, Shiwang Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02139 https://

Asymptotic behavior of the least energy solutions to the Choquard equation in dimension two
In this paper, we are interested in the following planar Choquard equation \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} -Δu=\displaystyle\left(\int\limits_Ω\frac{u^{p+1}(y)}{|x-y|^α}dy\right)u^{p},\quad u>0,\ \ &\mbox{in}\ Ω, \quad \ \ u=0, \ \ &\mbox{on}\ \partial Ω, \end{cases} \end{equation*} where $Ω$ is a smooth bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^2$, $α\in (0,2)$ and $p>1$ is a positive parameter. Unlike the higher-dimensional case, we prove that the least energy solutions $u_{p}$ n…

Dat lijkt me geheel terecht
Florida family files claim with NASA after ISS space junk crashes into home | Space
https://www.space.com/space-debris-florida-family-nasa-lawsuit

Day 9: Eniko Fox
Edit: added a store link for Kitsune Tails.
We're back to videogames, and with another author who's on the fediverse: @…
Fox has developed a few games, but the one that I've played and love is Kitsune Tails. It's a sapphic romance take on Super Mario Bros. 3, and (critically for a platformer) it's got very crisp controls and runs smoothly. I think one thing a lot of indie platforms devs struggle with is getting those fundamentals right, because on the technical side they require very challenging things like optimization of your code and extremely careful input handling that go beyond the basic skills necessary to put together a game. From following her on Twitter and now the Fediverse, it's clear that Fox is a deeply competent programmer, and her games reflect that. Beyond the fundamentals, Kitsune Tails has a very sweet plot with a very cool twist in the middle, and without spoilers, that twist made both the levels and gameplay very difficult to design, but Fox rose to that challenge and put together a wonderful game. Particularly past the plot twist (but in subtle ways before it) Fox is able to build beyond SMB3 mechanics in ways that gracefully complement the original, and the movement in the game ends up being difficult but extremely satisfying, with an excellent skill/speed response allowing for both slower, easier approaches that work for a range of players and high-skill extremely-fast options for those who want to push themselves.
There have been plenty of people I follow with indie game projects that are kinda meh in the end, and I'll still boost them without much comment if they're decent. Fox' work is actually amazing, which is why if you've followed me for a while you'll know I tend to mention it periodically, and which is why she makes this list of authors I respect.
You can buy Kitsune Tails here: #20AuthorsNoMen