Tootfinder

I had over three hundred accounts following me that I didn't follow back, mostly because I lost track of all the new followers.
So I did the unthinkable thing:
I asked Perplexity to write me a python script to follow everyone back. I will just unfollow some of them later, if I don't like them enough. But for now, everyone gets the benefit of the doubt.😉
The script needed some adjustments, but it worked.
Here's the script if you need it:

followback
A short python script that looks for all your mastodon followers that you don't follow back, and follows them.

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

This is a minor annoyance and I’m interested in identifying it as well as exploring solutions.
I frequently mistype (or write) double letters by doubling an adjacent letter & singularizing the should be double letter.
examples:
Booby for Bobby (my pal Bob HATES this)
noddle for noodle
felling for feeling
Could be Dysgraphia or related to Dyslexia.
I'd appreciate pointers to articles / tests, and any other help.
cc/ @…

"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall."
— Nabokov

Currently testing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with FSR 4 on Linux (thanks to Optiscaler oc). I must say I'm finally enjoying this and any other game I have tried so far to the fullest. There's just this nagging feeling of resentment that AMD doesn't seem to be in a hurry to do their own job and release officially FSR 4 for RDNA 3 on Windows and Linux, hence the turncoat hesitations. For what it's worth, I'd choose Linux over Windows any day.
Comments are from this vide…

I found a Tom Scott video from 2014 about privacy being dead back then, it is worse today in 2025 and it puts into perspective the lack of realization that people have to sense the change. It also predicts a different tech bubble (most likely AI) and an increasing level of surveillance, which we are seeing more of in the present with the UK laws in effect, and the EU following with their own laws for surveillance.
Honestly well worth the 20 minutes:

Titans QB Cam Ward has no ill will with DT Jeffery Simmons after dustup: 'It was fun, and I think it was what we needed' https://www.nfl.com/news/titans-qb-cam-ward-has-no-ill-will-with-dt-jeffery…

Since there has been a shift in what people mean by referring to the F-word I assume that in the near future there will be quite a few confused people looking at how often the F-word is used in films and going: "569 times! Martin Scorsese must really hate gay people".
So, for the sake of Martin Scorsese's reputation, call it the "F-slur".

Today, we had a fire alarm going off at @… when I was just working on a local :git: repo.
This reminded me on the popular meme:
In case of fire 🔥
1. git commit
2. git push
3. leave building
I always had some mixed feelings about it. Thus, I wrote down whats wrong with this meme on several levels (technical and social):

I mean, there's a reason the switch for "I have guests over, let's turn off the most surprising automations" is called "haunted house" in my HomeAssistant.
https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/115424228795514864