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

Every post you write is first read by a machine. Should the nature of writing change to accommodate that? I look at the pros and cons of adopting an AI-friendly grammar https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonippolito_writing-journali…

More than math. I have noticed for years a decline in reading, writing and grammar. I may not be the best, but at least most of the time I can compose a grammatically correct note that doesn't have spelling errors. I can (usually) read documents and I am capable of writing an executive summary.
https://flip.it/hiBh8X

When looking at what the western AI companies are doing my current view is:
- OpenAI is actively evil. There's no morals or anything. Just scamers trying anything to amass power and money
- Anthropic is has sniffed so much of its own farts that most of what they are doing is just writing fan fiction for their own models. They are not evil as much as they just need psychological help
- Mistral is yelling a lot of "we are European" which nobody hears cause who give…

Okay, after a bit of work in #vlang:
- I think I prefer golang though I really prefer the error system of `v`.
- I enjoy writing code in `nim` more than `v`. While I do enjoy `v` more than `rust`, the documentation and support extensions are better for almost every other language which makes things difficult starting out.

Originally, I argued to skip the «book of abstract» for SIG Writing 26. And maybe, creating one will acually be the best part in organizing it as I hopefully can do it with a fellow document engineer with a proper XML–XSLT–XSLT-FO–HTML–ePub pipeline! Maybe even LaTeX, who knows
Or the second best thing after printing stickers :)
#WritingResearch

Turns out writing a WP-CLI plugin (for my sins, in php) is not a road well travelled or sign-posted. Sigh.

Writing a good #CLAUDE.md
https://www.humanlayer.dev/blog/writing-a-good-claude-md

I'm thinking of (1) recording my #PIM lecture as a larger set of 5-30min video snippets (1 for each sub-topic) and/or
(2) writing a book with even more background information on the same subject including further links.
What would you consider more important to you personally?
Please do limit yourself to not more than 2 choices even if they are hard to do.

Just finished The Way of Kings.
while the writing was good and the characters were good it's such a poorly plotted book that it becomes unenjoyable.
Very little happens over 800 pages and while I love character development it's no excuse for how slow this moves. I would have enjoyed this at 500 pages. At 1000 I don't even want to read more.
#books

Say what you will, I read Sartre, and I don’t need anyone’s permission to think for myself.
#JeanPaulSartre #Sartre #Freedom

Day 19 (a bit late): Alice Oseman
As I said I've got 14 authors to fit into two days. Probably just going to extend to 30? But Oseman gets this spot as an absolute legend of queer fiction in both novel & graphic novel form, and an excellent example of the many truths queer writers have to share with non-queer people that can make everyone's lives better. Her writing is very kind, despite in many instances dealing with some dark stuff.
I started out on Heartstopper, which is just so lovely and fun to read, and then made my way through several of her novels. The one I'll highlight here which I think it's her greatest triumph is "Loveless", which is semi-autobiographical and was at least my first (but no longer only) experience with the "platonic romance" sub-genre. It not only helped me work through some crufty internal doubts about aro/ace identities that I'd never really examined, but in the process helped improve my understanding of friendship, period. Heck, it's probably a nice novel for anyone questioning any sort of identity or dealing with loneliness, and it's just super-enjoyable as a story regardless of the philosophical value.
To cheat a bit more here on my author count, I recently read "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao, which shouts out "Loveless" and offers a more expository exploration of aro/ace identities, but "Loveless" is a book with more heart and better writing overall, including the neat plotting and great pacing. I think there are also parallels with Becky Albertalli's work, though I think I like Oseman slightly more. Certainly both excel at writing queer romance (and romance-adjacent) stuff with happy endings (#OwnVoices wins again with all three authors).
In any case, Oseman is excellent and if you're not up for reading a novel, Heartstopper is a graphic novel series that's easy to jump into and very kind to its adorable main characters.
I think I've now decided to continue to 30, which is a relief, so I'm tagging this (and the next post that rounds out 20) two ways.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

"20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple" – Paris Buttfield-Addison
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

"chatbots over-rely on this kind of sensory-immaterial conjunction because[IT] impresses people passing superficially over a text--exactly the kind of fake-deep crowd-pleaser for which L.L.M. output is being fine-tuned."
(Original title: Will A.I. writing ever be good?)
https://maxread.substa…

Will A.I. writing ever be good?
Some notes on A.I. writing

I guess no-one should ever buy Apple gift cards. https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Is that an open source alternative to Framer/WebFlow? #Frappe #webdevelopment

A man named Earthquake.

June 2nd to 4, 2026, the #WritingResearch community will meet in #Winterthur, #Switzerland, for the

Every year, as I come up on my birthday, I start to think a lot more about the shooting. The intensity was a bit lower after Trump left office the first time, but October of 2024 was pretty intense.
As I've been processing through all this, I thought about the cards and letters folks sent to me in the hospital. I have a box of them in the US and sometimes I think about asking for them to be sent here. But things have a tenancy to get lost in the mail on the way here.
There's a little bit of a trapped and incomplete feeling, that Trump's chaos makes feel even more intense.
So I decided to write a bit about that box, and the hospital, and death.
CW: body horror, death
#Writing

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Word of the day: AI-washing
"Where management wants to cut labor costs a la Amazon, shift to cheaper contract labor a la Klarna, or execute layoffs for ideological reasons, a la DOGE, “AI” is an extremely potent justification. Some business professors and analysts have taken to calling this practice “AI-washing.””
From Brian Merchants excellent Blood in the Machine newsletter/substack.

Whimpering here. I am going through a large envelope of negatives with a few prints. From what I see they go back to the early 60s. Almost no information about when, where or who. For some of them I can make an educated guess based on clothing styles and cars.
A few rants (and a lot of whimpering)
- NEVER CUT NEGATIVES INTO INDIVIDUAL IMAGES
- don't dump multiple rolls of negatives into one sleeve.
- when there is writing they used pen and that fades over the d…

I was writing (a brilliant) post about something, but now I just want to say: Writing in a box in a browser-window makes the 1980's advice relevant again: *Save your draft often* ! The danger used to be MS Word crashing, now it's just switching away from the window that will destroy your nuggets of wisdom, for them never to be seen by anyone 😪

Started the semester with a delay of two weeks, but I think the first two courses today (“Computing in Context” and “Histoire de l’informatique”) went pretty well.
I’ve totally redesigned them and I’ll make use of index cards for in-class writing in both courses. Let’s see how this works out.
#AcademicChatter

I'm really starting to love Typst! It's so much easier than LaTeX and it compiles instantly.
Writing stuff in it is so much faster compared to LaTeX that I've started using it for my homework exercises (which I don't have the patience for with LaTeX).
The scripting language is really nice and there are a lot of packages you can use. I'm using physica to get braket notation and quill to be able to draw quantum circuit diagrams for example. Yesterday, I used the…

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

Started the semester with a delay of two weeks, but I think the first two courses today (“Computing in Context” and “Histoire de l’informatique”) went pretty well.
I’ve totally redesigned them and I’ll make use of index cards for in-class writing in both courses. Let’s see how this works out.
#AcademicChatter

Started the semester with a delay of two weeks, but I think the first two courses today (“Computing in Context” and “Histoire de l’informatique”) went pretty well.
I’ve totally redesigned them and I’ll make use of index cards for in-class writing in both courses. Let’s see how this works out.
#AcademicChatter

here is a photo of a pretty #grave for #TombTuesday Should of posted it a couple of months ago but..y'know
btw i just discovered, by accident that ALT U does to upper case in my terminal.
:moth_black_red:

After writing some questionable `rust` code for #adventofcode Day 8, I've managed to get the right answers in a reasonable amount of time which has taken far, far longer than I'd care to admit. I'll jump on the Python and Nim solves later because my brain is absolutely fried at the moment.
Solution:

Once More to the Paragraph
#teaching writing An email from The New Yorker a few mornings ago gave me a teaching idea. In it, Nathan Heller discusses E.B. White’s long relationship with the magazine. White is probably most famous for a children’s book, Charlotte’s Web, or perhaps for “Once More to the Lake,” an essay much anthologized in student textbooks, but at The New Yorker…

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

KTBox: A Modular LaTeX Framework for Semantic Color, Structured Highlighting, and Scholarly Communication
Bhaskar Mangal, Ashutosh Bhatia, Yashvardhan Sharma, Kamlesh Tiwari, Rashmi Verma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01961

KTBox: A Modular LaTeX Framework for Semantic Color, Structured Highlighting, and Scholarly Communication
The communication of technical insight in scientific manuscripts often relies on ad-hoc formatting choices, resulting in inconsistent visual emphasis and limited portability across document classes. This paper introduces ktbox, a modular LaTeX framework that unifies semantic color palettes, structured highlight boxes, taxonomy trees, and author metadata utilities into a coherent system for scholarly writing. The framework is distributed as a set of lightweight, namespaced components: ktcolor.st…

Taking notes from the successes and failures of the Russian revolution, a group of anarchists (including Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist militant who was critical in defeating the Tzar's army and who later also fought the Red Army) wrote a document titled the "Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists." This document came to be known as "The Platform." It remains one of the most important first-hand revolutionary documents, outlining a clear revolutionary plan.
I've taken this, the Viable System Model from cybernetics, and my own organizing experience, to describe an organization to confront the current set of crises.
This continues to build on the stuff I have been writing, but it's a lot less high level theory and a lot more specific.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/a-solarpunk-fractal-microservices
As always, editing notes (typos, grammar, spelling, etc) are always welcome, as are any questions. My ADHD brain tends to go a lot faster than anything else, so I have a tendency to drop words and have a lot of trouble catching them later. Between my ADHD and mild dyslexia, it can be pretty hard for me to catch when autocorrect gives me the wrong word.
A lot of folks have already been super helpful in offering their editing support, and I'm really grateful. Writing this has felt collaborative, and it should. On the one hand this comes from my own experience and research, but on the other I'm also voicing things that have come from conversations here. This has all been a bit of my voice and a bit of the federated world, and I'm really appreciating that.

I'm writing a #befunge interpreter in #rust (for fun) , and I've decided to make it unicode compliant. That means that emojis will be fair game in the funge source code, and I think those programs are going to be amazing to look at!

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

I was looking at a set of dumbbells described as "20kg adjustable". The product description lists the individual weights:
4x 0.5kg, 4x 1.25kg, 4x 2.5kg
Plus two bars.
That adds up to 17kg right? So we can determine that each bar weighs 1.5kg by themselves for a max of 10kg per dumbbell.
The reviews are absolutely full of people giving 1 star and writing NOT AS DESCRIBED ONLY 17KG and CAN'T MAKE IT 20KG UNLESS PUT ALL WEIGHTS ON ONE BAR.
🤦‍♂️

People at work have a habit of walking by my cube and looking at my computer screen.
Diabolical plans include:
- Showing spoilers to new/popular shows at the biggest font
- Leaving my completed Wordle up
- Writing a personalized message for each person
- Turning off my monitor and staring at a blank screen for 8 hours.

Generative AI alone may not be enough: Evaluating AI Support for Learning Mathematical Proof
Eason Chen, Sophia Judicke, Kayla Beigh, Xinyi Tang, Zimo Xiao, Chuangji Li, Shizhuo Li, Reed Luttmer, Shreya Singh, Maria Yampolsky, Naman Parikh, Yi Zhao, Meiyi Chen, Scarlett Huang, Anishka Mohanty, Gregory Johnson, John Mackey, Jionghao Lin, Ken Koedinger
https://…

Generative AI alone may not be enough: Evaluating AI Support for Learning Mathematical Proof
We evaluate the effectiveness of LLM-Tutor, a large language model (LLM)-powered tutoring system that combines an AI-based proof-review tutor for real-time feedback on proof-writing and a chatbot for mathematics-related queries. Our experiment, involving 148 students, demonstrated that the use of LLM-Tutor significantly improved homework performance compared to a control group without access to the system. However, its impact on exam performance and time spent on tasks was found to be insignifi…

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)

Got glasses. Progressives. I need them for reading text mostly, especially research and tech writing that seems to prefer using a 10pt font. They are REALLY weird to get used to when working on the computer. Edges seem blurry, I have to move my head around to focus, this is going to take a while to get used to. #oldnerds

Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

I came home to a letter addressed to both of us by name and I assumed it was mortgage since few things address both of us. I left it for J to indulge her childlike pleasure of opening mail.
It was actually a campaign letter from Reform UK. I assure you neither of us are members so I can only assume they got our names from the edited electoral roll.
I can't remember any other party ever writing to me by name before, it's always just been "occupant" or similar.

Everytime I stumble upon this, I'm made joyus by Jim's writing! ^^
The Humble Link - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/the-humble-link/

People at work have a habit of walking by my cube and looking at my computer screen.
Diabolical plans include:
- Showing spoilers to new/popular shows at the biggest font
- Leaving my completed Wordle up
- Writing a personalized message for each person
- Turning off my monitor and staring at a blank screen for 8 hours.

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 interesting—a maturing replacement to LaTeX! It's called Typst.
I've been using LaTeX for all kinds of word processing since I left the academic world behind—I'm writing the manual for my Gnome for seniors in it, at the moment. Might be interesting to switch to Typst, to try it out. (#latex #typst #linux #opensource #oss #typesetting

Day 13: Patricia C. Wrede
If you know me you know I'm not exactly a fan of monarchy-praise, even (or perhaps especially) in "fairy tales" and adjacent writing, but even though Wrede's Princess Cimorene doesn't quite completely get away from that, I still love the character and her adventures in "Dealing With Dragons" and the sequels. It's honestly pretty cool that Wrede started out writing a trope-flipping fairy-tale adventure-comedy with a male teen prince protagonist, and then decided it was much more fun to focus on a princess who takes the trope-flipping to the next level and completely abandons most of the trappings of a fairy tale in order to both have fun with what's left of the genre and develop a story centered on wholesome friendship (with a dragon) and practical solutions to improbable problems.
I read these books as a kid, and then again as an adult, and then again out loud with my wife, and I'll be reading them again before long with our kids. I'm still on the lookout for more kids books with even better politics, but Wrede's work is definitely part of a solid childhood reading foundation from my perspective.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Day 5: Robin Wall Kimmerer
I'm taking these liberty of changing my hashtag and expanding the intent of this list to include all non-men, although Kimerer is a woman so I'll get to more gender diversity later... I've also started planning this out more and realized that I may continue a bit beyond 20...
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous academic biologist and excellent non-fiction author whose work touches on Potawotomi philosophy, colonialism (including in academic spaces), and ideas for a better future. Anyone interested in ecology, conservation, or decolonization in North America will probably be impressed by her work and the rich connections she weaves between academic ecology and Indigenous knowledge offer a critical opportunity to expand your understanding of the world if like me you were raised deeply enmeshed in "Western" scientific tradition. I suppose a little background in skepticism helped prepare me to respect her writing, but I don't think that's essential.
I've only read "Braiding Sweetgrass," but "Gathering Moss" and her more recent "The Serviceberry" are high on my to-read list, despite my predilection for fiction. Kimmerer incorporates a backbone of fascinating anecdotes into "Braiding Sweetgrass" that makes it surprisingly easy reading for a work that's philosophical at its core. She also pulls off an impressive braided organization to the whole thing, weaving together disparate knowledges in a way that lets you see both their contradictions and their connections.
The one criticism I've seen of her work is that it's not sufficiently connected to other Indigenous philosophers & writers, and that it's perhaps too comfortable of a read for colonizers, and that seems valid to me, even though (perhaps because I am a colonizer) I still find her book important.
An excellent author in any case, and one doing concrete ideological work towards a better world.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Day 29: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
I've been sitting on Simpson for a while because there's some overlap in her writing with Robin Wall Kimmerer, and I've had a lot of different genres/styles/subjects/media I've wanted to post at least one author from. But I've now hit repeats on at least YA romance and manga, and Simpson's writing is actually quite different from Kimmerer's in a lot of ways. While Kimmerer is a biologist by training and literally braids that knowledge together with her knowledge of Potawatomi cosmology and ethics, Simpson is an Anishinaabe philosopher and anarchist, and her position as a scholar of Indigenous philosophy adds a different depth to her work: she talks in more depth about knowledge relationships and her connections with specific elders, and she has more citations to other Indigenous theorists, which is the one criticism I've ever seen of Kimmerer's work. Rather than being Indigenous and a scientist, she's Indigenous and a scholar of indigenous studies.
I've only read "Theory of Water" by Simpson, but it was excellent, and especially inspiring to read as an anarchist. Simpson's explicit politics are another difference from Kimmerer's work, which is more implicitly than explicitly political. This allows Simpson to draw extremely interesting connections to other anarchist theorists and movements. "Theory of Water" is probably a bit less accessible than "Braiding Sweetgrass," but it's richer from a theory perspective as a result.
In any case, Simpson is a magnificent writer, sharing personal insights and stories along with (and inseparable from) her theoretical ideas.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Just finished "Low Orbit" by Kazimir Lee.
It's an excellent graphic novel about a queer Malaysian immigrant kid in small-town Maine, the unexpected friends she makes, and the science fiction author who happens to be her landlord. It reminded me a bit of the also excellent "Navigating With You" because of its interwoven fictional sci-fi novel (with really good writing!). CW as predictable for queer family trauma, although it doesn't get too bad and has a happy ending.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

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

Via @…
Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
N. K. Jemisin.
Incredibly powerful writing and writes science fiction and fantasy that I actually enjoy reading after getting disillusioned with the Tolkein lineage for its deep racism & colonialism. Her Stone Sky series is wildly creative in terms of world building, had an excellent epic plot to rival any of the other greats you could name, has complex and compelling characters, and a satisfying conclusion. She's won the right awards, and I hope that that translates into a lineage of people building in her ideas as rich as Tolkien's.