@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-27 03:00:46
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
@villavelius@mastodon.online2025-10-26 09:11:11
Het is een tragedie dat partijleiders in tv debatten min of meer gedwongen zijn een relatief infantiele toon aan te slaan in plaats van de volwassen toon die je in goede podcasts hoort, zoals bijvoorbeeld in dit gesprek met Frans Timmermans. Zelfs als je het niet met hem eens denkt te zijn is dit verrijkend.
@jhamel@social.linux.pizza2025-11-27 15:25:30
@cdarwin@c.im2025-10-26 21:51:11
Elizabeth Warren here — Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan told me I could reach out, because this is important.
Peggy is the partner I need to get things done in the Senate,
that’s why I have officially endorsed her campaign.
I know she will be a champion for Minnesotans in Congress.
Can you please pitch in $5 or anything you can to help power her campaign?
I’ll explain more below about why this is such a critical race.
@boris@cosocial.ca2025-12-26 16:30:45
The Bonfire team have met their first “maintenance” fundraising goal. The next stretch goal is designing and shipping federated groups.
There is lots of good writing in this post about the needs of different types of groups.
https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/why-<…
@paulbusch@mstdn.ca2025-10-27 11:52:37
Good Morning #Canada
Finally, arriving at our our 10th province, Manitoba, and putting this series to rest means no more nightmares. Friendly Manitoba, it says so right on their license plates, also has hundreds of abandoned towns, but today we'll focus on Scarf. Named for William Scarf, not for winter clothing or the more recent term for eating quickly, the settlement began in the 1880s, started to flourish after train service arrived in 1907, and died slowly after train service stopped, with the last residents leaving in the 1980s. But in 2013, the regional mayor decided to sell parcels of land in the ghost town for $10. I wasn't able to find out if this plan to bring Scarf back from the dead was successful, but perhaps the area is cursed. In 2020, a tornado touched down near Scarf, killing two teenagers when their vehicle was swept off the road.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianGhostTowns
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-rm-looks-to-sell-ghost-town-lots-for-10-1.2086700
@luana@wetdry.world2025-10-22 18:54:51
The corruption was weird af tho
What the fuck?
I do have a journalctl log but I couldn’t really find the reason everything failed on it.
@jake4480@c.im2025-11-27 19:13:16
This week's #ThursdayFiveList is #RainyDayMusic ☔ Being in the desert, I always want more rain, we get so little. These five have Creedence bookends and start off with John asking if you've seen the rain, but then eventually it becomes too much, and then he asks who'll stop it
Creedence -…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-10-25 20:47:01
The energy we need is this suburban dad standing out in the street
-- barefoot with Blackhawks pajama pants on
-- screaming at the masked goons to get the fuck out of their neighborhood.
https://bsky.app/profile/mandophotos.bsky.social/post/3m3zsb6vurk2u
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-11-26 13:36:33
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