Tootfinder

No Glass on the Table
Students came back to Columbia College this September with printed books and pens. In Literature Humanities, phones stayed in bags....
https://bolesblogs.com/2026/09/30/no-glass-on-the-table/

NFL Week 7 Betting Report: Books Seeing Surprising Action On Key Showdowns https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfl-week-7-betting-report-books-seeing-surprising-action-key-showdowns

I see actual ads for books on the Internet now 🥲

#GooglyEyes #books #silly
When you take a look at a book, and it looks back...

I made a little book out of some old bits of internet I found down the back of the sofa:
Talking dogs.
Sarcastic cats.
Strange sports.
Bizarre rituals.
Dumb jokes.
Stupid advice.
Weird ideas.
...OLD HAT
More info: https://gilest.org/books/old-hat/

Something I do when reading to my kids that I hope helps a bit with all of the patriarchy in children's literature is to randomize the genders of the characters, including the occasional non-binary options and various neopronouns, and sometimes swapping mid-story (especially when there's a metamorphosis, like in "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"). There are so many things that are asymmetrically distributed between genders in books for babies and children, but if you randomize the genders, you can blunt that (I hope).
#parenting #patriarchy #gender

Destroying rare books to stave off large language model collapse seems like a far cry from recursive self-improvement for generative 'AI'.

a question for astronomers here in 2026: if the digital world were to vanish, Carrington Event or some other reason digital devices wouldn't work, would you still have the capacity to aim your telescope at planets or predict occultations?
Thought of this today thinking on how I threw my ephemeris books in the recycle years ago because, like, why would I ever need one? I have #Ephem!
I'm pretty sure I still have a compass, and the trig algorithms in printed books …

The Second Cow
Howard Stein told jokes the way other professors assigned books. He ran the playwriting program at Columbia and chaired its Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, after teaching stops at Iowa and Yale....
https://bolesblogs.com/2026/10/10/the-second-cow/

Oh, that's a real loss. RIP Bonnie Greer.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/16/bonnie-greer-writer-and-cultural-commentator-dies-aged-77

Leaning in to proper #UkrainianLanguage learning - this arrived yesterday, all the way to Australia from Ukraine, even during the war!
https://studyukrainian.org.ua/books/yabluko-ukrainian-elementary/
I like Memrise, particularly their Ukrainian team, but it's a relief to have a textbook with explanations (even if I'll need a translation app to read the instructions). First exercise is the vowel sounds I've been struggling to differentiate ...

I've written a LOT of documentation in my career, some books, quite a log of blog posts. Turns out this is a key skill for trying to teach AI to be helpful on mostly-undocumented legacy projects! I'm 2.5k words into this morning's Claude-facing textbook and I think we're getting somewhere.
I do also touch type, yes :)

#GooglyEyes #books #silly
When you take a look at a book, and it looks back...

I'm impressed (in a good way!) that this review of a book about the tragic killing of Malcolm Kerr, American University of Beirut president, never once mentions his son.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/books/review/the-best-kind-of-american-christopher-de-bellaigue.html

My credit card details seem to have been cloned. Fun fact: I only used this card to buy a few Kindle books, donate to the Python Software Foundation and pay to reserve a seat with British Airways.
So, which one do you think leaked my card data?
Or is there any other way some asshole was trying to buy shit in the US with my money?

I just finished The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez. I wish it hadn't ended, so I could know what happened next. Still, I get why it ended there and to be honest, that was the end of the story being told.
It reminded me a bit of Slow Gods by Claire North. However, while it takes a long time, the characters of Slow Gods are able to see some kind of social justice whereas the corporate overlords in The Vanished Birds are much more like our own reality. Not that it's doom and gloom. It's just more nuanced in how fault is distributed and true justice isn't likely.
I don't want to spoil either books. They're both worth a read, but The Vanished Birds does have a wider cultural distribution of characters than the cis, white man that is Slow Gods' main character.
#Bookstodon #SciFi #ScienceFiction

Currently trying out @… as a replacement for @…'s Drive. Snappy and the mobile app is good. The fact that it has rclone support already places it higher than Proton Drive in my books.
#Proton #ProtonDrive #DeProton #Drive #CloudStorage

RE: https://flipboard.com/@newyorktimes/books-odnvsuh8z/-/a-49UgPcaqRUSxxSdsGflceA:a:3195393-/0
“Academia is a meritocracy” 🤣

New Nelsonsphere product: a page for all my book reviews. This started as Goodreads data but significantly improved in presentation, including neat controls for slicing and sorting.

Chat, can you recommend to me thoughtful, well-researched books about #GamerGate ? Maybe published a little after it happened so that the author has a chance to summarise and reflect?
Note - my sympathies are with the women & other victims, I do not need to need to read about how the perpetrators still believe their behaviour was justified. I can simply open Steam comments for that POV, tyvm!
Boosts welcome #AskFedi

I notice that publishers like #Amazon and #Apple are careful not to use the term "AI" for their AI slop audiobooks, calling it "virtual voices" and "digital narration" instead. Don't be fooled, fellow writers, it's AI taking the hard work of professional narrators. If you don't want your work replaced with slop, don't use AI voices for your books or AI graphics for your covers.
Hire real human narrators like @… instead 👏
#writingcommunity #Draft2Digital

Have finished 'Balcony Over Jerusalem' by John Lyons. It's showing its age (published 2017), but was on this list: #AmReading #Bookstodon

Saw #WizardOfTheKremlin , probably the last screening at my local. Now I'd like to read the book.
For a film about Putin (told from his advisor's point of view), you learn almost nothing about his motivations / mentality. But I did learn that events I had separated in my mind occurred at nearly the same time (Putin turning to politics/Russian apartment bombings 1 month later) (Sochi Olympics/'little green men' invasion of Ukraine).
There are a number of interesting one liners/points of view from all of the protagonists and some nostalgic (for me) nightclub scenes.
The costume, hair and makeup departments were excellent, btw, with exactly the right bad haircuts. Alexander Zaldostanov and Igor Sechin looked especially convincing, Putin was also surprisingly true-to-life.
P.S. feel free to recommend me *good* films/books on related topics

Happy #birthday to me...
#books #TerryPratchett #StarWars @… #SteveHackett #RyanNorth