Tootfinder

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Scott helpfully reminds us of the differences between technical purity, semantics, and what actually matters to users in the context of — yes, really — paragraphs:
https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2024/08/29/paragraphs.html

Mainstream media is owned by Billionaires.
They control even small-town newspapers and TV.
Expect this belittling of your beliefs and actions:
https://bsky.app/profile/briarish.bsky.social/post/3m3koppqktc2r

Briar (@briarish.bsky.social)
Coverage of No Kings in the print MN Star Tribune is terrible. Story is in Section B (State & Region). Number of protesters is "throngs" (not the actual 10s of thousands). Main picture is the start of the Minneapolis protest that shows about 50 people, and a couple dozen more in St. Cloud.

Good Morning #Canada
The month of December will typical put a dent in your paycheck, or January if you're using your credit cards, so it's tough to save any money. Canadians rank 21st worldwide with regards to how much of our salary we put into a savings account. According to World Population Review, we put away approximately 7% of our paycheck for a #RainyDay, far behind South Korea at 35%. I'm retired and therefore not a saver at this point, but even during my most successful earnings period I can't imagine I would have been able to put away a third of my salary.
I suspect the savings percentage is driven by a small group of high wage earners as individual Canadian debt has increased. According to Equifax, total consumer debt in Canada reached $2.56 trillion at the end of 2024, a 4.6 per cent increase over 2023.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://www.equifax.ca/business/blog/all-news/-/story/stable-versus-struggling-canada-s-financial-divide-widens/

Defector reports Year 5 revenue up 1% YoY to $4.65M, including $3.8M from subscriptions; all 19 original co-founders continue to work at the worker-owned outlet (Defector)
https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-five

Defector Annual Report, September 2024 – August 2025 | Defector
Published on November 19, 2025 Purpose of this report Defector celebrated our fifth birthday in September 2025. It is a great honor, and something of a burden, to be publishing a fifth Annual Report. The year-to-year story of our business is one of general stability—an incredible luxury in digital media—with incremental and hard-won improvements. But…

Holy sh*t, what timing. The National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, is furloughing 1,400 people on a day that I broke the story that a foreign threat actor infiltrated the NNSA's Kansas City manufacturing plant.
This story broke after my exclusive on how foreign threat actors infiltrated the NNSA''s Kansas City plant went live.

Federal agency overseeing US nuclear stockpile will furlough most of its workforce starting Monday
The federal agency responsible for overseeing and modernizing the US nuclear stockpile will furlough the vast majority of its staff Monday as the government shutdown drags on, according to the Department of Energy.

Maye's 91 completion pct. tops Brady's Pats mark https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46652629/qb-drake-maye-breaks-tom-brady-patriots-record-completion-percentage-win-vs-titans

My bet is that this will turn into a fairly substantial copyright and contract case.
"Kristen Bell Is the Star of a New Fox Jesus Podcast. No One Told Her"
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/kristen-bel…

Kristen Bell Is the Star of a New Fox Jesus Podcast. No One Told Her
Fox's new Jesus podcast features Kristen Bell as the voice of Mary Magdalene. Bell, however, recorded the audio 15 years ago for a different project.

“What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling.” https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/12/18/Humanist-Plumbing

Humanist Plumbing

The best part is that any one of these grocery food chains could just choose to do this, and it wouldn't even be a fraction of their budget for a single social media post—in other words, it'd be good marketing @…