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

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

New background finished, and I think it turned out better than it should have. I really enjoy writing, but trying to write background for characters that are very, very different than yourself are also very, very difficult. However, I'm gonna call it done for the time being and just relax.
#pathfinder2e

Some people now argue that LLMs are useless. I disagree; they can be very useful if you take them as what they are: models of language that generate text on the basis of some given text. As such, they can be useful for a wide range of text-related tasks, including assisting with writing. And the more formulaic the genre, the better they work obviously. This is part of the reason why they are so popular with students, and in academia more generally.
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Some people now argue that LLMs are useless. I disagree; they can be very useful if you take them as what they are: models of language that generate text on the basis of some given text. As such, they can be useful for a wide range of text-related tasks, including assisting with writing. And the more formulaic the genre, the better they work obviously. This is part of the reason why they are so popular with students, and in academia more generally.
⇢

Don’t Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt
The cover of Burt's Don't Read Poetry. It shows what looks like an uprooted daffodil. #poetry #poetrycommunity I have been working through books on reading, writing, and teaching poetry in preparation for writing a new poetry module. In …

How do you organize your file system? Are you using a system like #PARA, #Johnny.Decimal, the #Cornell method, or sorting by projects, topics...?
Here is my approach:

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

Pre-ordered this on a whim ages ago, and it just arrived. Very pleased with this little gift from past me.
If you like lovingly crafted, idiosyncratic books, this is one for you.

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…

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/

When writing a parser for a new (programming) language and you find yourself doing a lot of lookahead, and making design compromises to avoid that.. I wonder what a language would end up like if you parsed it backwards from the start? Like just reversed the code as a string. Would the language end up more humane? I guess this is already a thing but don't know the search term..

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man named Earthquake.

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

Along the way I learned how to create a nice document from all the Markdown files I have written in Obsidian. With Pandoc and LaTeX stitching the chapters together as one PDF or EPUB. And of course I lost way too much time solving the last typesetting problems, reading documentation of either Pandoc or templating for Latex. It was a fun ride.
#pandoc #latex #obsidian #writing

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

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

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.

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.

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:

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…

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.

@… because nobody is paying a developer these days for writing code (anymore) - if i hire someone, that person needs to know how to orchestrate ai agents. asking someone about their AI stack shows which century they live in 😉

#EroticMusings 23: Does your (or loved ones') physical/mental health make your work difficult? Does your work help?
Writing my little cozy fantasy erotica is usually a place for me to decompress and to balance the horrors of the world, so it certainly helps with mental health.
But at the same time, mental health getting too bad or me being too sick to be able to write a mea…

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'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…

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

My toots are getting too long and I sometimes want to share more than just (but also) my tech ramblings.
With all that metal running just fine, it's time to do sth else. And more.
The two excellent write-ups below pushed me over the brink, website and blog time!
Thanks to @… and @…

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!

@… hi Elena! I'm digging deeper into self hosting (I've been doing that for more than 15 years on simple sites, image hosting, and some tools at a web server), but, I'm thinking of using more complex apps. The point, on why I'm writing to you 😃 aren't you afraid of the security side? Thousands of sites are being hacked daily, aren't you afra…

“I get that Tsoding and Valigo are probably writing tongue in cheek but really, if Emacs is so useful you can’t live without it, why are you complaining? You can, after all, change anything you don’t like.”
Or add anything you’re missing, for that matter. If you know #Emacs, why try anything else?

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.

Cowboys release former All-Pro CB Trevon Diggs https://insidethestar.com/cowboys-release-former-all-pro-cb-trevon-diggs

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:

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 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.
🤦‍♂️

If you are an anti-fascist, you are against petroleum. Petroleum funds fascism globally. It is at the heart of the military industrial complex driving global imperialism, from both the US and Russia. Motonormitivity is fascist, both in it's elitist roots and in it's ties to historical fascism (Hitler hated bikes, just on principle). Oil is militarism.
Oil is the dominant resource which drives war, both in terms of it being the primary spoil wars are fought over and in terms of fueling the military vehicles and weapons that carry out those wars. Practically every war since (and including) WWII has been over oil. Genocides are carried out to secure oil. Gaza is over oil, in more ways than one.
Oil is the absolute enemy, and AI is simply an extension of that: an attempt to atomize us so we can't resist the oil-centric global order, one last grasp at the control over our lives oil has given to those whose power is now threatened by a solar punk future.
"I haven't written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title [Kairos] has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause."
Now is the time to resist by making something different, by creating a world fundamentally opposed to these systems of oppression.
This is the last in my Kairos series. From here on out I'll be editing to try and make it more of a book than a series of posts. Thanks to everyone who has helped so far. All editing is welcome (typos, spell checks, questions and challenges). Between ADHD and dyslexia, it's always hard for my brain to notice mistakes in my own text so I always appreciate the support of those who can.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/kairos

note: links to post of #ice shooting video.
As horrid, tragic, and fascist as this day's news has been... the one bright spot around here is that people are learning about why federated, peer distributed, and non-corporate platforms are essential for our democracy.
We used to all* believe that this was what made the corporate platforms special, but that was just a fake, a feint, and ultimately, a fascism.
sharing this video is democracy, freedom,
resistance.
Spread the word! The #SocialWeb will fight this tyranny!
*tbf: some folks saw the writing on the wall better and a lot earlier than the rest of us. Respect to them.
#peertube #usa #cdnpoli #canpoli #theAmericanFascist #ice #minnessota #fascism #ediverse #socialweb
cc: to some pioneer politicians on Fedi. @… @… @robbotteril@socialbc.ca @… @… https://social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/115856612394163845

Whoever leaked these Halo builds was clearly having fun writing the readme 😂
Getting ready to set the Xbox up so checked for Cerbios updates, blows my mind the latest release was in the last month... for a 25 year old console 🥲

Many of us probably hope that we’ll get back to normal when the #genAI bubble bursts, but this isn’t going to happen. In academia, genAI *does* work, in the sense of: for many people it solves a lot of problems, and removes the need for like doing homework, reading, writing, learning, and, yes, thinking. Who cares whether its “ethical” or whatever, everybody’s using it!
My bet is that post-…

Many of us probably hope that we’ll get back to normal when the #genAI bubble bursts, but this isn’t going to happen. In academia, genAI *does* work, in the sense of: for many people it solves a lot of problems, and removes the need for like doing homework, reading, writing, learning, and, yes, thinking. Who cares whether its “ethical” or whatever, everybody’s using it!
My bet is that post-…

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.

Disable my ad blocker to see your article? Nope. How about generic ads? ALSO HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW I AM RUNNING AN AD BLOCKER? Maybe because you are running a F*****g invasive script?
Guess what, I don't go to your site. There are sites with ads that don't ask me that and guess what? I go to their sites. Sometimes I even click on the ad as I find it interesting.
Also, for a couple of true journalists I also pay a bit so that they can keep on writing.

“I get that Tsoding and Valigo are probably writing tongue in cheek but really, if Emacs is so useful you can’t live without it, why are you complaining? You can, after all, change anything you don’t like.”
Or add anything you’re missing, for that matter. If you know #Emacs, why try anything else?

“I get that Tsoding and Valigo are probably writing tongue in cheek but really, if Emacs is so useful you can’t live without it, why are you complaining? You can, after all, change anything you don’t like.”
Or add anything you’re missing, for that matter. If you know #Emacs, why try anything else?

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

So my #introduction
Hi my name is Alex, I'm from Russia, I'm 24 years old.
Self taught sys admin and python programmer.
Wrote many web scraping applications and other utilities on collecting, organizing, and showing data on my jobs. And now finally coming around to writing my own site. Still have no idea of what to do with it. So if you have any ideas for what to p…