@brian_gettler@mas.toThe team I've cheered my whole life failed once again to make it all the way through October (but they got close!). So while my neighbors would call it fish and chips, we're having what any self-respecting Brewers fan knows is called fish fry for Game 1 - it is Friday, after all. Go Jays Go!
#baseball #WorldSeries
@raiders@darktundra.xyzRaiders show signs of life, but still lose 9th straight game https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/raiders-show-signs-of-life-but-still-lose-9th-straight-game-3598618/
@fanf@mendeddrum.orgfrom my link log —
A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.
https://woodrush.github.io/blog/posts/2022-01-12-lisp-in-life.html
saved 2025-12-12
@Xexyz@mastodon.me.ukLonely Mountains Downhill: feeling stylish
One of the things I really appreciate in a game is if it makes me look good, full of style, skilled in a way that I'm not in real life. Elaborate swordplay leading to combination hits; parkour across a cityscape; flying through buildings and structures with no effort and no fear. Many games make me feel stylish - or maybe the correct word is cool?
@gwire@mastodon.socialSaw a clip of a preacher retelling an anecdote about a chess grandmaster being shown a painting of the devil having apparently defeated his opponent at chess for his soul. The grandmaster studied the painting and saw that there was still a path to avoid a checkmate. So the painting contained a secret inspirational message of hope!
Yet when people accurately model the game state from Die Schachspieler and feed it into chess analysis algorithms, Mephistopheles always wins
@mia@hcommons.socialA surprise benefit of mRNA vaccines could be better treatments for cancer, extending lives without the side effects of chemo? Yay for good news! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/covid-mrna-vaccines-cancer-patien…
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaKimi Onoda, Japan's new Minister of State for Economic Security, is a 43 year old half-Irish ex-game industry PR femcel with an extensive history of defending her exclusive attraction to anime boys on twitter
@cdarwin@c.imElizabeth Holmes
— who, not incidentally, stole hundreds of millions of dollars from investors
— is lobbying for a pardon from President Trump.
And why not?
Game knows game. Grift knows grift.
Of all the powers a president wields, few match his awesome pardon authority.
It is sweeping and life-changing. Idiosyncratic, resting wholly on personal whim, and irrevocable.
Once granted, it is impossible to reverse.
The power to pardon is also, like a…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialDay 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
@neverpanic@chaos.socialHad a lovely evening while playing an experimental board game on post-quantum #cryptography with people from Tampere University, the OpenSSL Foundation and Cybernetica.
A fitting end for the 2025 #OpenSSL Conference.
@stefanlaser@social.tchncs.de
@catsalad@infosec.exchangeMicrosoft has invited vibe working. We did it everyone! We won capitalism!
https://www.theverge.com/news/787076/microsoft-office-agent-mode-office-agent-anthropic-models
@ginevra@hachyderm.ioI've a question about #PointAndClick games: why does the character seem to shrink & grow as they move around a room?
They look like they're shrinking or perhaps walking down stairs as they move towards the viewer. (The opposite of real life when things close to you seem big!)
It's not just this game, I've seen the same issue in lots of other games.
Is it because the character is staying the same size but the room is drawn with perspective?
@raiders@darktundra.xyzBrowns’ Shedeur Sanders Gets Clear Warning From Raiders Star https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/browns-shedeur-sanders-ashton-jeanty/?adt_ei=[email]
@NFL@darktundra.xyzJa'Marr Chase likens Joe Burrow to Captain America as Bengals enter critical Bills game as underdogs https://www.nfl.com/news/jamarr-chase-compares-joe-burrow-captain-america-underdog-bengals
@stevefoerster@social.fossdle.orgI just beat #MinesweeperOnline in 144 seconds on Expert mode!
https://minesweeperonline.com
I mean, the bad news is that I wasted 144 seconds of my life. The good news is that it was only 1…
@detondev@social.linux.pizzawe all love a good, cozy, game for when we don't have the spoons for the rest of life. however, since stardew valley dropped, the scene hasn't been as fresh as it was... until now:
welcome to your new life... in shutka!
💳 HUSTLE up from humble garbage collection, to hawking addidas tracksuits, all the way to illegal eastern-european trucking gigs!
💘 ROMANCE lean swarthy men and women who all have impeccable hair and 40% of their teeth!
🍾 ENJOY gigantic bottles o…
@portaloffreedom@social.linux.pizzaDid you know there is a scientific conference called Artificial Life? ALife in short.
It's actually quite a cool one. They are nerds that nerd about the game of life and the like.
@raiders@darktundra.xyzJaguars Receive Strong Message Before Raiders Game in Week 9 https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/jaguars-strong-message-before-week9/?adt_ei=[email]
@raiders@darktundra.xyzWhy Jaguars' Battle is Geno Smith's Make-or-Break Game https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-jacksonville-jaguars-geno-smith-devin-lloyd
@raiders@darktundra.xyzRaiders’ Geno Smith Doesn’t Hold Back on Two Key Players https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/geno-smith-doesnt-hold-back/?adt_ei=[email]
