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

We could stop burning and overheating the planet. We could end world hunger. We could provide better health care and education to all the people.
We just don't want to. We decided against.
Because of profit, some laziness and the claim that others have not “earned it” and it would be unfair to make the world a better place for everyone.

Yesterday they've released SOLO Leveling: Arise Overdrive.
I kinda liked anime and game looked good, so I've tried it.
I was surprised, when in the middle of the fight everything stoped and I couldn't move / use any skills / attacks.
My surprise was even bigger when outisde of the battle I stopped moving for about 10(maybe 20) seconds.
Fights are perfect🤌, if it wasn't "always online" "feature" it would be really good game with great c…

Copland: "Billy The Kid Statements For Orchestra" (1958) (LSO, Copland cond.)
I got this at a thrift store yesterday, just because the lp cover is so crispy and new looking. Hard to believe it's 68 years old.
#NowPlaying #AaronCopland

#TuneTuesday (Nov 25)
#Lizzo’s “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)” is such a bop and I can’t help liking its infectious energy! It certainly gives me 80s vibes because of the use of synths and especially with the key change for the final chorus. 🎧

Roadmap: Emerging Platforms and Applications of Optical Frequency Combs and Dissipative Solitons
Dmitry Skryabin, Arne Kordts, Richard Zeltner, Ronald Holzwarth, Victor Torres-Company, Tobias Herr, Fuchuan Lei, Qi-Fan Yang, Camille-Sophie Br\`es, John F. Donegan, Hai-Zhong Weng, Delphine Marris-Morini, Adel Bousseksou, Markku Vainio, Thomas Bunel, Matteo Conforti, Arnaud Mussot, Erwan Lucas, Julien Fatome, Yuk Shan Cheng, Derryck T. Reid, Alessia Pasquazi, Marco Peccianti, M. Giudici, M. Marconi, A. Bartolo, N. Vigne, B. Chomet, A. Garnache, G. Beaudoin, I. Sagnes, Richard Burguete, Sarah Hammer, Jonathan Silver
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18231 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18231 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18231
arXiv:2511.18231v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The discovery of optical frequency combs (OFCs) has revolutionised science and technology by bridging electronics and photonics, driving major advances in precision measurements, atomic clocks, spectroscopy, telecommunications, and astronomy. However, current OFC systems still require further development to enable broader adoption in fields such as communication, aerospace, defence, and healthcare. There is a growing need for compact, portable OFCs that deliver high output power, robust self-referencing, and application-specific spectral coverage. On the conceptual side, progress toward such systems is hindered by an incomplete understanding of the fundamental principles governing OFC generation in emerging devices and materials, as well as evolving insights into the interplay between soliton and mode-locking effects. This roadmap presents the vision of a diverse group of academic and industry researchers and educators from Europe, along with their collaborators, on the current status and future directions of OFC science. It highlights a multidisciplinary approach that integrates novel physics, engineering innovation, and advanced researcher training. Topics include advances in soliton science as it relates to OFCs, the extension of OFC spectra into the visible and mid-infrared ranges, metrology applications and noise performance of integrated OFC sources, new fibre-based OFC modules, OFC lasers and OFC applications in astronomy.
toXiv_bot_toot

From that observer who was taken yesterday, shared here with permission, because we could all use a good laugh. (Note: Whipple is the fed bldg that’s ICE’s MSP HQ)
❝So here’s my story about returning to the world…
When they let you out of Whipple, they give you back your personal effects (minus your phone). And just send you out the front door with whatever you were wearing when you came in.
So I’m walking out the front door of Whipple, probably looking like an ice agent coming off shift, and pulling all of my random shit out of my bag/dropping it in the snowbank, etc.… And I can hear the protesters at the gate, taunting me… “oh did you drop your phone, you piece of shit?” “You’re TERRIBLE!” “Fucking Nazi!” And I was just loving it, actually. But when I got closer and used my big voice “You assholes are barking up the wrong tree…. These MF’ers just released me!” The crowd went absolutely crazy.❞

I always avoided creating an account in Teams. I always joined in the browser, partly because the Desktop Teams client refused to even let me join someone else's meeting on the grounds that I hadn't shelled out for a licence.
Anyway, at some point - possible when I rolled back to the last known good version of MS Office (2019) to avoid the mandatory 365 subscription bullshit - it got installed and managed to identify me without me noticing.
And so now, inevitably, it is…

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

"When #billionaires own major media outlets, “news” becomes something closer to state messaging. Not because the government controls it, but because the financial class that funds political power also owns the platforms that shape public perception."
#kleptocracy
Legacy M…

Legacy Media's License To Kill
We've lived to see the day when a newspaper excuses the man who butchered their journalist By November, 2018, the CIA had concluded that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And moreover—that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the killing.