Tootfinder

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

"Dr. Charles Misner, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 91, was a professor of physics at the University of Maryland from 1963 to 2000, and a renowned expert in General Relativity. He was the recipient of the Albert Einstein medal in 2015, and was the co-author of “Gravitation”, one of the best-selling books in the subject of General Relativity, featuring none other than Kip Thorne on the cover."

Charles Misner & Patrick Cooney
Given the pervasiveness and versatility of computers in our world of 2025 it is easy to ignore that 80 years ago they were initially conceived as what we would call today a calculator, specifically created to solve tedious mathematical problems. Of course, users of TikTok, Call of Duty, YouTube, Visual Studio Code, or even readers of this website through some web browser like Firefox are usually (and blissfully) unaware of the gazillion computations per second that it takes to produce everythin…

How the Venezuelan government is using crypto and stablecoins like USDT to manage the downturn; Venezuela sells most of its oil to China and is paid in crypto (Anatoly Kurmanaev/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/20…

How Maduro Is Responding to Trump’s Pressure on Venezuela’s Economy
President Nicolás Maduro’s opponents hope a new period of economic pain will finally topple his government. He is using cryptocurrency to hold on.

Just received an email from Jetbrains about data collection in their IDE
> We’re now adding the option to allow the collection of detailed code‑related data pertaining to IDE activity, such as edit history, terminal usage, and your interactions with AI features. This may include code snippets, prompt text, and AI responses.
> If you’re using a non-commercial license, detailed code‑related data collection will be enabled as part of your next IDE update – you will be notified …

A look at how the Canadian Journalism Collective has distributed Google's annual CA$100M payment under the Online News Act; 400 outlets have received funds (Gretel Kahn/Reuters Institute)
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.a

First-principles response simulation of wide-gap CdTe-DSDs for the FOXSI solar sounding rocket experiment
Shunsaku Nagasawa, Takahiro Minami, Tadayuki Takahashi, Shin Watanabe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00738

First-principles response simulation of wide-gap CdTe-DSDs for the FOXSI solar sounding rocket experiment
We have developed a wide-gap CdTe double-sided strip detector (CdTe-DSD) for the fourth and fifth flights of the Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager sounding rocket experiment (FOXSI-4/FOXSI-5). This detector features a 30 um strip width and a variable gap width from 30 um to 70 um, enabling position resolution finer than the strip pitch by inducing charge sharing across adjacent strip electrodes and utilizing this shared energy information for position reconstruction. However, this wide-gap con…

TTA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Text-to-Audio Models
Hui Wang, Cheng Liu, Junyang Chen, Haoze Liu, Yuhang Jia, Shiwan Zhao, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Hui Bu, Yong Qin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02398

TTA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Text-to-Audio Models
Text-to-Audio (TTA) generation has made rapid progress, but current evaluation methods remain narrow, focusing mainly on perceptual quality while overlooking robustness, generalization, and ethical concerns. We present TTA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating TTA models across functional performance, reliability, and social responsibility. It covers seven dimensions including accuracy, robustness, fairness, and toxicity, and includes 2,999 diverse prompts generated through automated …

As Susie Madrak noted here,
"Democrats have one ask:
fund healthcare, in the form of extending ACA subsidies and restoring funding to Medicaid that was cut in Trump's Big Beautiful Ugly Bill."
But we're hearing Republicans, who have the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court,
say that Democrats are holding the country hostage.
The White House's response to Democrats wanting to secure health coverage for 20 million America…

WH Responds To Dems Wanting Health Care In Funding Bill: 'Go Fuck Yourself'
“We’re going to extract maximum pain."

Promptable Longitudinal Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body CT
Yannick Kirchhoff, Maximilian Rokuss, Fabian Isensee, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00613 https://

Promptable Longitudinal Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body CT
Accurate segmentation of lesions in longitudinal whole-body CT is essential for monitoring disease progression and treatment response. While automated methods benefit from incorporating longitudinal information, they remain limited in their ability to consistently track individual lesions across time. Task 2 of the autoPET/CT IV Challenge addresses this by providing lesion localizations and baseline delineations, framing the problem as longitudinal promptable segmentation. In this work, we exte…

Day 10: Stacey Mason
Another academic, but this time one of my compatriots; we overlapped at UC Santa Cruz as advisees of Michael Mates, and even collaborated on a Twitch stream called ScholarsPlay for a bit, although we never coauthored any papers. We did chat about our research, and I had many good discussions with her about agency in interactive fiction, a topic we both published on. Her paper "On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives" (#20AuthorsNoMen