Tootfinder

Things I'm still in love with on this guitar:
⁃ How well it intonates. It is unbelievably in tune, and it stays that way
⁃ I unblocked the Floyd Rose, and now I'm just having a ton of fun with it
⁃ Pulling on the tone knob sets the bridge humbucker to parallel, which gives just killer low gain Americana and country tones
⁃ Jumbo frets. I literally can never go back to anything else
#guitar

I'll be honest, I hear about "waves" of people coming to mastodon/Fediverse and I cringe a little.
Choose your metaphors carefully, people.
Waves go back to the ocean after wrecking your sandcastle, people
*I'm* enjoying this particular beach but I'm aware that I'm here through a sort of survivorship selection — the people who stay here with me are compatible with me because we're all the same sort of flotsam

I keep realizing that one of my main differences in behavior is that I don't let fear of loss keep me from connecting with people nor existing comfortably in places.
It plays out in some specific ways. I'm usually the first to volunteer to lend something, and I'm willing to (and in fact most excited to) lend whatever it is to someone I don't know. I know I might not get it back. It’s _fine_.
I'm willing to leave my bike locked up in a part of the city where it might get stolen. It won’t, probably but it might. And that's fine. Annoying, but fine. It's cheap enough to replace. Expensive enough to suck but it's fine.
What I'm tilting at here though is that the constant vigilance to make sure things work out okay and the waiting for low-risk situations cuts us off from a lot of things. Better to have a bit of a "well fuck" budget. Go do the thing. It'll probably be fine. if not, well, it sucks, but ... it's fine.

Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
[JENNA looks through the bars at the prisoner, then walks back through the holding cell. BLAKE is asleep on a single bed. Someone is stealing his watch while he sleeps. It is VILA. VILA attempts to steal something from BLAKE'S pocket. BLAKE wakes up and pushes VILA to the floor.]
VILA: Easy! Take it easy! I hate personal violence, especially when I'm the person.

I haven't folded laundry yet. The past 2 days I have a showdown w/ murdercat. I'm sitting at the table, I see her put a paw onto the clean laundry basket, figuring out her best approach.
"Erie," I say. "Eeeeeeerie. Erie."
She looks back at me, frozen.
"Hi Erie. Please don't go into the clean clothes."
She shifts her weight, looks back at the laundry, & puts another paw on the edge.
"I see what you're doing. …

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
AFI:
🎵 Voidward, I Bend Back
#NowPlaying #AFI
#newRelease 🆕 album
https://runforcoverrecords.bandcamp.com/track/voidward-i-bend-back
https://open.spotify.com/track/1X3cCp55Pui90xhNa8X6zL

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/

So, something that's become clear to me is that we still have a real need for self-managing community email lists like we used to have. Many people still use Google Groups, which are horrible. The old Ezmlm and Mailman lists I used to run are now creaky and hard to maintain... I've done a bit of a look around - I implemented Listmonk, but it's not what I'm after - it's broadcast/marketing, not any subscriber to all subscribers. So I've come back to Mailman, now on v3.…

Anybody want to spend a few minutes drawing up a sign / logo for "Andrew's Back Room Semiconductor FA Lab" that I can use (with credit) in an upcoming blog or something?
The sketchier the better, I'd love to see what people come up with. "Literal sharpie on a piece of cardboard" is the level of effort I'm looking for.

A good account (bot) to follow, it reminds when I forget to add an alt-text to a picture and makes one,
https://fuzzies.wtf/@altbot

Altbot (@altbot@fuzzies.wtf)
129K Posts, 4.35K Following, 3.92K Followers · Hi! I'm Altbot™ your accessibility companion! I help make the Fediverse more inclusive by generating alt-text descriptions for images. Let me assist you! How to Use: > Mention me (@altbot) in a reply to any post with images! > Follow me and I'll follow back to help with your posts > I'll generate alt-text for images that need it Important Notes: Your media is processed locally on my own server and NOTHING is saved or used for training. Comple…

𝕮𝖆𝖙𝖚𝖗𝖉𝖆𝖞 𝕾𝖕𝖊𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝕰𝖉𝖎𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓: Three adorbs cats in my neighborhood (sounds like I'm posting to NextDoor!)
#cats #photo #photography

Fuck it. I'm back at rusting. No bevy, rawdogging SDL GPU this time.

Not to pat myself on the back, but I'm really happy with how the alt texts of the @… bot that are generated from #openstreetmap tags through an Overpass query.
It makes the alt text show where the image was taken, what's potentially in the frame but also context around it. I enjoy reading them every day!

Series A, Episode 07 - Mission To Destiny
CALLY: I'll get the others.
BLAKE: I'll be back in a minute. [Leaves room]
[LIBERATOR - Gan and Jenna view the scanner.]
GAN: He's cutting it too fine.
JENNA: Come on Blake, get out of there.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/107/464

#NowPlaying the absolute banger from 2000, dead prez' genius LP 'Let's Get Free'. Damn, I listened to a lot of this one back then. Like visiting an old friend
https://youtu…

🎵 Dead Prez - Lets Get Free (2000)
Dead Prez - Lets Get Free (2000) 01. Dead Prez - Wolves 2:17 02. Dead Prez - I'm A African 3:20 03. Dead Prez - 'They' Schools 5:07 04. Dead Prez - Hip-Hop 3...

The Eagles rejuvenated Saquon Barkley, and now he's free to run wild (again): 'I love what I'm able to do'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/the-…

I'm pleased to see many younger politicians among the new crowd...
The Democrats Just Took a Big Step Toward Getting Their Groove Back - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/us/politics/democratic-party-mamdani.html

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"…

Nice to be briefly back at the old stomping grounds.
Unfortunately that also brings the cold (as in having a cold) back to me. Forgot about it; it requires quite a lot of beer to sooth away.
Big plus of living in Vietnam: no colds or flu (or hardly ever).
Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's gone when I travel back 😜

“the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector,”
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115277162069992407…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
Attached: 1 image Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into AI discussions. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026. ‡probably ⹋"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI" -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: …

Today I find myself wondering why the MAGA theme song is YMCA instead of Time Warp? After all YMCA is about “playing with boys,” while Time Warp would seem more aligned to the ideas MAGA says they stand for of bringing back the good old days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1O2-oFmWXM&list=RDu1O2-oFmWXM&start_radio=1

TBH, all I really want to do is go back to bed and sleep for the rest of the week lol
I'm not sick, it's just a vibe I'm feeling

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
BLAKE: Where are we?
VILA: In a transit cell.
BLAKE: I don't understand.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/101/227 B7B1

Geneva, my old fiend, I'm back (for a short while anyway)

Oh for fuck’s sake! Like I don’t have enough to do. But no, even paying for something to get a basic service isn’t enough in this fucked up world. https://infosec.exchange/@themoep/115474387322154883

Looks like no one at #immich ever reported #cursed issue https://github.com/immich-app/immich/i

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

Most of the responses seem to be for coders.
I hope I won’t ever need to do another sysadmin interview but I wonder how silly it would be to have someone using a LLM to respond.
I ask wildly open questions because I don’t care as much about what they know as I do about how they think. Come back with what reads/sounds like LLM output and I don’t care where it came from or even if it’s technically correct.

Book Review “The End” by Joel Wainwright
This book is unlike the majority of books I have reviewed here. It is a very serious, academic treatise. The reason I wanted to read it was not because I am a communist (I'm not) but because the blurb I got suggests that it "confronts the planetary climate crisis". I did my due diligence and flogged my way through the entire book - which was a bit like going back to university.

Book Review “The End” by Joel Wainwright
This book is unlike the majority of books I have reviewed here. It is a very serious, academic treatise. The reason I wanted to read it was not because I am a communist (I’m not) but because …

If you need me, I'll be in my office.

Series D, Episode 06 - Headhunter
AVON: Well now, that remains to be seen.
[Vila and Tarrant on Scorpio's flight deck.]
TARRANT: It is a straightforward pickup.
VILA: I'll believe that when we're back at base.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/406/21 B7B5

I'm looking for inexpensive linear actuators. I bought a $15 unit that uses an M3x0.5mm threaded rod and it's not horrible, but the effector has a lot of backlash. This has more stroke than I need; I only need about 65mm of stroke. But I wouldn't want to be particularly larger than this. Roughly 20mm x 20mm x 100mm would be my target envelope.
I'll fall back to using this with backlash compensati…

One of my options for a replacement PC. It will plug into the UPS so that when I lose power, I can do a safe shutdown.
https://flip.it/xKF142

Update: The "Mountain Life" calendars are all gone (#NoirCountry

is AI real life
is it just fantasy
caught up in the hype
no escape from reality
#ai #llm #vibecoding

Series D, Episode 09 - Sand
[Reeve, Servalan and her assistant head off for the base. Outside there is the sound of wind blowing the sand, which is everywhere. Chasgo tries to move the ship.]
SERVALAN: Try your communicator.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/409/44 B7B6

Grand Theft Auto Vice City: packages, police, and pootling
Back in April, when I completed Vice City, I posited that I might try playing San Andreas in "a few months". It has now been a few months, and I'm not playing it. I have a bit of a mental blocker on that game, partially around the setting, but also because I remember when it was released that there were countless reviews evangelising the detail they'd gone into, with you needing to regularly work out to keep…

Have now seen the win. The thing that gave me the most joy was the Anfield crowd singing Slot's song several times throughout the match (and Mo too, even before he scored).
Backing the manager and the team, when the outside world was declaring it "a crisis moment" was such a wonderful display of grace. Made me proud to support this club.
It was also great to see Mo have his touch back. I'm not saying he's fully back in form, but he looks more confident and …

Mailbag: Comparing Prescott to Hurts? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-comparing-prescott-to-hurts

I have leveled up once again. I used to be really interested in geo/mapping stuff and this whole biking thing has rekindled that, and now that I need to figure out how to bike to places, I am mapping like mad!
I found a route from work to the shops to home avoiding busy streets, which I *never* thought I would be able to do, but I'm doing it now!
#biking

Day 7: Brenda Romero
I hinted yesterday I'd be moving beyond a narrow definition of "author," so of course that means I'm going to include game designers. I'll definitely get back to some more traditional authors before I hit 20, but I wanted to mix things up early.
Brenda Romero is something of a celebrity in the niche culture that is the Game Developers Coherence, I like to imagine. Of course the misogyny there likely means many just pay attention to who her husband is, but she's a terrific designer in her own right, if not prolific.
Content warning: the Holocaust
To me her most outstanding game has always been "Train," which is an exhibition tabletop game in which players collaborate to load and unload cargo and move train cars around a board, with the stated objective of efficiently delivering cargo to meet certain collective goals. However, through both physical cues and in-game reveals, it becomes clear to players that the game they are playing stimulates the Holocaust, and the cargo they're moving is people being brought to extermination camps. The actual goal of the game is for the players to stop playing and walk away, or perhaps to play against the stated objective and gridlock the trains. Romero supervised play at the expos where it was presented, and intervened to stop the game if the players continued too far (in some cases not picking up on the hints offered because they had very little knowledge of the Holocaust as a historical event). I've never played the game myself; just heard Romero give a report about it, but the sheer genius of designing a game meant not to be played to help educate about a system within which defying the rules was the only ethical action earned her instant respect from me. Romero has a whole series of games in this vein about didn't historical events (not necessarily all designed to not be played), although last I checked in most are just at prototyping stages.
I've got other non-man game designers that will appear on this list, but Romero stood out to go first because she's a good example that you don't need to be someone prolific or widely-known to do great work; I'd bet most people have an author or two they respect who is not widely known (and I'll include at least one more from that category on this list).
#20AuthorsNoMen

I needed a little break from a ternary encoded display, so I went back to one of my old favourites. French Decimal Time 🇫🇷.
As a side note, since it is no longer DST in Europe and I'm the same timezone as the Swatch headquarters 🇨🇭, it's also actually the current valid time in .Beats (a.k.a. Swatch® Internet Time)! 🥳
#DecimalTime

I am having severe issues with LSPs.
Now it is Rust Analyzer.
Before I had OOMs with the Go LSP.
And I am not alone; there are many posts like this.
Regardless of editors.
People report it with VSCode and NeoVim.
I guess I will get back to Zed again for now.
Just the conveniences of auto-complete, going to definitions, keyboard-only use and nice integration with a terminal is what I'm after.
I know that IDEs have terminal panes, but they are cumbe…

Beginning to wonder about moving to a new instance in the indefinite vaguely near future, since IOCX admins seem to be a bit behind the curve (we're still on mastodon 4.3.7).
I poked them but havent heard back or even seen any posts from them in a while, which makes me wonder if I'm living on a ghost ship.
Anyone have suggestions on one that's generally friendly to cool EE research, OSS/OSH, infosec, etc stuff?

I've probably mentioned that I'm working on switching #Gentoo from our half-broken eselect-ldso logic to #FlexiBLAS. This also involves a transition period where both setups would be supported.
A good thing is that the switch is ABI-compatible with the previous state (or at least it's supposed to be — we're working with upstream on fixing function coverage). Since libblas.so, liblapack.so and the rest are replaced by symlinks, programs that link to them will simply start using FlexiBLAS. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, switching the other way doesn't work as well. Stuff newly built against our libblas.so & co. symlinks naturally reads FlexiBLAS's SONAME from them, and links to libflexiblas directly. So should you decide to switch back, some packages will stay linked to FlexiBLAS and will need to rebuilt.
In order to avoid this, I would have to replace the symlinks with wrapper libraries, having libblas.so.3 and so on SONAMEs, and linking to libflexiblas. Unfortunately, a dummy wrapper isn't going to work — the linker will complain about using indirect symbols from libflexiblas.so. So I would probably have to "reexport" their symbols somehow, and ideally split into appropriate libraries, so that `-Wl,--as-needed` wouldn't drop some of them. But how to do that?
Well, let's look at the existing logic for eselect-ldso — clearly both BLIS and OpenBLAS create some wrappers. So I've spent some time investigating upstream Makefiles, and literally couldn't find the respective targets. I mean, these are quite complex Makefiles, but I'm grepping hard and can't find even a partial match.
As it turns out, these Makefile targets are added by Gentoo-specific patches. And these patches are just horrible. In case of OpenBLAS, they create the wrapper libraries by linking all the relevant .o files from OpenBLAS build, plus the shared OpenBLAS library. So the OpenBLAS symbols relevant to each interface end up duplicated in libblas.so, liblapack.so, etc., and apparently the symbols needed by them are taken from libopenblas.so. The individual interface libraries aren't even linked to one another, so they expose their own duplicate symbols, but use the implementation from OpenBLAS instead.
BLIS is even worse — the patch is simply creating libblas.so and libcblas.so, using all BLIS objects directly, plus symbol visibility to hide symbols irrelevant to the library. So yes, libblis.so, libblas.so and libcblas.so are roughly three separate copies of the same library, differing only in symbol visibility. And of course libcblas.so doesn't use libblas.so.
Truly #GSoC quality.

Lots of channels cut into the walls ready to be wired and have new plug sockets added.
The existing plug socket's back-boxes are apparently stuck or important for the wiring or something so can't be removed. Can't just expand those holes to have 2-gang sockets in their place. I'm told that we'll have to put a blank face plate on them and add the new 2-gang sockets above instead of to replace the existing ones. Won't really matter at all, they'll be behind the drawers or inside the sideboard cupboard anyway.

Another CD just joined my #navidrome !
I really have to hold myself back at ebay 😄 But I'm still running cheaper than a Spotify account

The drones in Denmark story reminded me of the Gatwick airport incident way back in 2018. It doesn't seem clear if there ever were drones there and I think we never got a full explanation...
DR this morning were being very careful to rule in real sightings even had film of one), but also mentioned places where they were suspected but not confirmed. Seems wise to not over interpret.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident

From diamond to BC8 to simple cubic and back: kinetic pathways to post-diamond carbon phases from metadynamics
Roman Marto\v{n}\'ak, Sergey Galitskiy, Azat Tipeev, Joseph M. Gonzalez, Ivan I. Oleynik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00423

From diamond to BC8 to simple cubic and back: kinetic pathways to post-diamond carbon phases from metadynamics
The experimental observation of elusive post-diamond carbon phases at extreme pressures remains a major challenge in high-pressure science. Using metadynamics with coordination-number-based collective variables and SNAP machine-learned interatomic potential, we uncover atomistic mechanisms governing the transformation of cubic and hexagonal diamond into post-diamond phases above 1.5 TPa. The transition initiates via homogeneous nucleation of nanoscale liquid droplets, which rapidly crystallize …

I'm experimenting with AI music generation and...it's scary good now. I am writing my lyrics myself using old creative writings, but considering I did play violin back in high school it's scary what I can output. https://suno.com/s/6tKtasq9wwe1kNlM

Charlie (penguinz0) pulls back the veil on how much ad money he's made as a streamer & why he won't take donations from anyone any more.
(Spoiler: $40M in the last ~5yrs. Top streamers are filthy rich & he's not a top streamer)
▶️ I'm Not Turning It Back On - penguinz0
https://

I'm currently reading The Long Heat by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm and highly recommend it. Do not be daunted by the page count of 704 pages. It has so many notes at the back, without back matter it's only ~420 pages. Hard to read emotionally, though. It paints a stark picture of earth's near future and the massive destruction of human and other-than-human life ahead, and the insane brinkmanship of elite consensus.

Woman running at the Thom B Classic in Hammond Hill State Forest -- This Sunday I'm going to be at the Ithaca 5&10 put on by the Fingerlakes Runners Club
https://fingerlakesrunners.org/race/ithaca-5-10-2025/

Ahh bliss. For the first time since Mum went into hospital just over 2wks ago I've actually slept through the night for nearly 9hrs! Sleep fell to pieces initially, no more than 2hrs at a time for several nights which was murder, esp as I still had to go to work, go to hosp, speak to docs etc. I'm back on the magnesium bisglycinate and have chucked in valerian again too for the time being. Added now we know the plan for her and have certainty that she's not coming home so my brai…

I'm sending a digitally signed and encrypted #email with somewhat sensitive data to an external party.
His thank-you-answer with the full quote of the while conversation came back signed and unencrypted.
Oh boy. 😔
#PIM

>Ordered something from AliExpress.
>It hasn't arrived after 60 days.
>Open dispute.
>I want full payment back
>AliExpress: "Here is our offer: Half refund"
>Also AliExpress: "We'll also immediately mark this as you agreeing"
Guess I'm not ordering from AliExpress anytime soon again.

I woke up at 2am (I'm having trouble sleeping), saw that production was down, saw that I can't fix it myself, and sent an email looking for a fix. Do I leave it down and go back to sleep?

I was given a company phone last used by my predecessor. How's this for security? I'm not sure who put those stickers there.

It's fine. it's not really a big deal. it's fine.
But the amount of times Colville says "So I was in a meeting with my employees at the company I named after myself and when I said an idea everyone loved it"
like I'm sure folks disagree and push back and it's all great. But it's just a funny story to hear every time for me.

It's a year since the last chemo round. And 6 months off venetoclax 🤢 I'm cancer-free(-ish) and back to work at HashiCorp (now IBM, which sounds very weird to me)

Lovely piece, and why I often take small hotel rooms in cities: so I'm forced out to go explore. I especially love this line: "I understood how a metropolis allows you to be solitary without being lonely." People who don't live in cities don't get this.
https://www.nytim…

Opinion | The Paris Métro Smell That Transports Me
A whiff of the Paris Métro flings me back to a summer I spent in France.

I'm sure there's a reason for this, but there were a LOT of iPhones at the Apple Store yesterday, just standing on the table, and leaning up against the magsafe charger stands.
I couldn't leave until I had put them all back on properly.
#Apple

Reading is losing because I'm not there in the crowd
this is why I'm gonna try to go back for all of January bc I can go to 5 Reading matches and 2 @… matches by my calculations
#fedifc

Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
RAVELLA: Did you have any trouble?
BLAKE: No.
RAVELLA: You followed the route I gave you?
BLAKE: Yes. Can we get on with it please.
RAVELLA: Come on.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/101/5 B7B5

I sat down on the sofa for five minutes after lunch to browse Mastodon. Unfortunately this happened and now I can't move and so with the greatest of regret 😆 I will be informing my boss that I'm not coming back online this afternoon. I'm sure he'll understand.
#CatsOfMastodon #floof

I'm not like other girls
(I'm a dinosaur 🦕)

Coworker is using a multi-billion-dollar coding assistant to read regression-test error messages back to them
... error messages that I wrote specifically so that they could be interpreted by a non-expert, including suggestions about "what to do if you see this message"
so now they're bragging about how they're "increasing efficiency with AI tools" and SOMEHOW IT'S MY FAULT AND I'M NOT GETTING THE CREDIT AT THE SAME TIME
*ahem*
anyw…

I'm back! This morning was fun, I did a 7.6 mile ride on the borrowed ebike, and almost the entire ride was without pedal assist. I kicked it in for the hills (about 6 in total) but the majority of the ride was pedal powered.
Using the assist just for hills is doable. It's a bit more work but that's okay. It's probably the same amount of work I would do on my lighter Trek.
Average speed was pretty close to what I would get on the non-powered Trek.

Retro style fantasy fps Wizordum is coming to consoles September 23, and I'm psyched to grab it (when it goes on sale, as I usually wait for). Have to decide if I want it for Switch and/or Xbox. I played the demo on Steam a while back (it's here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1715…

Wizordum on Steam
Wizordum is a retro FPS that puts you in the role of a Mage on a quest to track down the source of Chaos. With a wide arsenal of spells and magic items, battle your way through the world of Terrabruma in this unique blend of classic 90s shooters and modern gaming elements.

As Microsoft EOLs Windows 10, I'm reminded of why Windows is fundamentally broken, by design. https://davelane.nz/windows-broken-design When you're a global platform monopoly, your existing users are your biggest competition. Your interests and those of your customers are diametricall…

'I'm going to get Dan back': Aaron Glenn ready to add to legacy in Jets-Dolphins rivalry https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46367615/new-york-jets-coach-aaron-glenn-fake-spike-rivalry-dolphins

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

OK... Ceph adventures under control at least for the time being, the cluster is back at HEALTH_OK state.
Back to another round of deprocessing and imaging on the PIC12F683. I have a whole bunch of video I want to shoot but I really want better poly and substrate imagery before I do that, just for eye candy as I'm explaining things.

Here's Nº 31 Zoraida Icabalceta from IC's Bombers Turning a Corner and the back Side of Nº 11 June Dickson -- College sports is starting up again and I'm looking forward to seeing some Soccer games and developing Cornell Basketball shots from last Winter while waiting for the season to start
#photo

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
ENSOR: I'm on three-quarter boost as it is. She's not responding! I'm going to maximum. It's all right. It's all right. She's slowing. Compensators beginning to hold. [Ship starts to steady.] Come on, come on, that's my beauty. That's...come on. Pull us back, pull us back. All right, she's coming back. We're all right.
MARYATT: Don't do that too often, will you? I'm a very nervous passenger.

Day 21: Aya Yoshinaga
I'm actually generally much less aware of the creators involved in the anime I watch, for a number of reasons, and the few anime directors I could name without looking them up were all men before I started this list. I've now got a short list of anime directors/writers who are women, and the first I'll include here is Yoshinaga, in part because she was pivotal to one of my favorite lesser-known anime, "Kurau Phantom Memory". It was actually one of the first anime I watched ever, but I didn't like it just because of that, since I've rewatched it at least twice and still regard it highly. It's got a pretty cool science fiction setting, an extremely cool barely-comprehensible alien race, a female protagonist who is not sexualized and not subjected to romance, and it centers a platonic relationship torn apart by technological hubris. Very "cool seinen stuff that wouldn't make it past the focus groups today" stuff.
Besides Kurau, Yoshinaga has worked on other great stuff like Golden Kamuy, Azumanga Daioh, Durarara, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and when you see a correlation like that between well-written shows and the same writer showing up again and again, it's clear there's talent there, even if most of these are manga-based.
Probably going to circle back to at least one more anime writer, but for tomorrow I'll move on to manga probably, since I want to space out all my YA enthusiasm a bit.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Series C, Episode 11 - Moloch
DAYNA: Wait, I'm coming with you.
[Scene shifts back to Tarrant. One of the guards sprints toward him; the other removes a small card from their weapon, and studies it thoughtfully.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/311/308 B7B3

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
MEEGAT: I will await your return.
VILA: You'll wait up there by the door?
GAN: If we make it, we'll be back.
MEEGAT: The Lord Avon will protect you. [Vila gives Gan a skeptical look and the two of them go on ahead.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/398

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

Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
[Next day; outside hangar]
TARRANT: Where the hell's Avon?
VILA: He's back. I saw him go inside. [Tarrant heads toward the hangar]
VILA: [To Dayna] I won't be a moment.
[Landing module]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/305/497

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)

Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
VARON: Stay here. I'll, uh, I'll search the bodies and get picture tapes.
[Scene: Exterior shot of The London on the launchpad. Cut to the interior as the prisoners are led inside.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/101/396 B7B4

Just finished Transiruby, along with a 9k-line journal file for it. I almost got 100, but not quite; I don't have time to go back to it before the semester starts though.
If you like exploration games, it's an excellent one, with great level design & tons of secrets. It actually makes you do significant secret-finding and map-reading in order to beat the game, not just for extras or a special ending, which is something that a lot of metroidvania games since Super Metroid don't do. My one complaint is that the map system isn't perfect, and finding obscure secrets to progress is fine when the map hints at them but much less fun when it hints incorrectly (I looked one progress item up in a speedrun video because of this).
Decently cool movement mechanics, although the combat does take a back seat and almost all of the bosses are easy (I beat the final two bosses in the third and second tries respectively). I don't think that's any better or worse than a game like Nine Sols where the final boss took me hundreds of tries though; just a different flavor. The world-building isn't as rich as the more epic metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or Lone Fungus (or again, Nine Sols) but again I'm fine with that. It's just a more casual game that has really excellent level design & exploration poetics.
#AmPlaying

C11 - Moloch
TARRANT: [O.O.V.] Listen, I need to come up. It should be possible if you adjust the teleport to omicron pulse length. - Cally, are you hearing me? I need teleport now.
[Scene shifts back to Tarrant. The guards are aiming a weapon at him.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/311/298

Uspol, genocide
In case you're wondering whether "political violence" is escalating in the U.S.A. right now, of *course* it is as we move into an era of concentration campus and domestic military deployments. But both domestic genocides and purges as well as political violence targeted at individual prominent figures has been a *constant* throughout American history, from gun duels fought between political rivals to massacres of Native Americans in order to steal their land, to pogroms against Catholics, to literal wars on local Black success and political participation, all dating back before the American Revolution to the beginning of colonization. Thanks to Wikipedia, here's a *small sampling* where I attempted to whittle things down to about one event per decade before recent times.
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_political_violence_in_Washington,_D.C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States
Killings, woundings, and plots against political figures:
Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in 1804
Sam Houston beats Rep. William Stanbery in 1832
Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835
Fight between Representatives Churchwell & Cullom in 1854
Caning of Sen. Charles Summer in 1856
Brawl on the House floor in 1858
Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865
Assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881
Assassination of President William McKinley in 1901
Attempted Assassination of William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in 1909
Wounding of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912
Bombing of the U.S. Senate reception room in 1915
Attempted Assassination of President Herbert Hover in 1928 (in Argentina)
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1947
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1950
The United States Capitol Shooting in 1954
Planned Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1960
Attempted Assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1963
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
Weather Underground bombings in 1970, 1971, and 1975
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1972 (Alabama Governor George Wallace was targeted & injured instead)
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1974
Planned Assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1974
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Gerald Ford in 1975
Wounding of President Ronald Reagan in 1981
Attempted Kidnapping of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981
Planned Assassination of President George Bush in 1993 (in Kuwait)
Attempted Assassinations (x3) of President Bill Clinton in 1994
Attempted Assassination of President Bill Clinton in 1996
Anthrax attacks on US senators in 2001
Attempted Assassination of President George W. Bush in 2005 (in the foreign country of Georgia)
Planned Assassination of President-Elect Barrack Obama in 2008
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2009 (in Turkey)
Attempted Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2011
Shooting of Rep. Gabby Gliffords in 2011
Planned Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2012
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2013
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2015
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Donald Trump in 2017
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2018
Pipe bombs mailed to Democratic leaders in 2018, including former President Barack Obama
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2019
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2020
Kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020
Planned Assassination of Former President George W. Bush in 2022
Planned Assassination of Former President Barrack Obama in 2023
Attempted Assassination of President Joe Biden in 2023
Planned Assassinations (x2) of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Wounding of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Massacres and other mass killings, mostly with genocidal motivations:
The Acoma Massacre in 1599
The Paspaheg Massacre in 1610
The Wessagusset affair in 1623
The Mystic Massacre in 1637
The Pound Ridge Massacre in 1644
The Susquehannock chiefs massacre in 1675
The Apalachee Massacre in 1704
The Massacre at Fort Narhantes in 1712
The Norridgewock Massacre in 1724
The 1745 Massacre at Walden (in 1745)
The 1756 Massacre at Walden (in 1756)
The Killings by the Paxton Boys in 1763
The Yellow Creek Massacre in 1774
The Gnadenhütten Massacre in 1782
The Canyon del Muerto Massacre in 1805
The Battle of Tallushatchee in 1813
The Philadelphia Nativist Riots in 1844
The Bloody Island Massacre in 1850
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864
The Opelousas Massacre in 1868
The Chinese Massacre in 1871
The Election Riot of 1874
The Haymarket Affair in 1886
The Buffalo Gap Massacre in 1890
The Wilmington Massacre in 1898
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre (in 1906)
The Ludlow Massacre in 1914
The Elaine massacre in 1919
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921
The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
The Bonus Army Conflict in 1932
The 1937 Memorial Day massacre (in 1937)
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963
The Kent State shootings in 1970
The Greensboro massacre in 1979
The MOVE Bombing in 1985
The 4 O'Clock murders in 1988
The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995
The September 11 Attacks in 2001
The Fort Hood Shooting in 2009
The Holocaust Memorial Shooting in 2009
The Isla Vista killings in 2014
The Charleston Church shooting in 2015
The San Bernardino attack in 2015
The Orlando Nightclub Shooting in 2016
The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting in 2018
The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019
The January 6th Capitol Attack in 2021
The 2022 Buffalo Shooting (in 2022)

Series C, Episode 11 - Moloch
CHESIL: Done to who?
DORAN: My pal, that's who. What have they done to my pal?
CHESIL: Your pal? I don't know who you mean.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/311/496 B7B2

Series B, Episode 01 - Redemption
BLAKE: It's all right, Vila. I think we've lost them.
VILA: How'd you know?
BLAKE: We're still here. Cut the auxiliaries. Get back to primary drive. [To Avon] Are you all right?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/201/124 B7B2

Series D, Episode 11 - Orbit
AVON: Orac mark two. Just a replica I made a few months back. Contingency planning, Vila, and the contingency arose.
VILA: But the thing worked!
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/411/372 B7B3

Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
AVON: You are forgetting that the Aurons rejected her. They sent her into exile.
TARRANT: You were exiled from Earth.
AVON: I go back as an executioner.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/307/194 B7B3

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
CALLY: Oh, you fool, Vila.
VILA: Stop worrying, Cally. I'll be back soon. Tell you what, I'll bring you back a present. What would you like, Cally? Name it and it's yours.
CALLY: A necklace, Vila, made from your teeth.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/202/201

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
TRAVIS: I don't break that easily.
SERVALAN: You were expected to resign the service. Why didn't you?
TRAVIS: I've told you, I want my command back. It's the only way I can catch -
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/235 B7B5

Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
P.A.: [V.O.] Security clear on cell unit M-three for Justice Department access.
VARON: I'm Tel Varon, Justice Department. I've been assigned to defend you.
BLAKE: I don't need a defence. I'm going to plead guilty.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/101/157

Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
VARON: Listen, I, I'm sorry I didn't believe you. I'll be in touch. [They leave.] C363
VILA: Friends in high places? Can't you put a word in for me?
BLAKE: I'll try and think of one.
JENNA: Leaving us?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/101/325

Series D, Episode 04 - Stardrive
AVON: About two billion tons, I would say.
TARRANT: Range one hundred thousand and closing.
DAYNA: Well, then I say the whole scheme's crazy.
AVON: Why?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/404/9 B7B5

Series B, Episode 09 - Countdown
RALLI: That's Provine! That's his service record. [She picks up the card] That's the man I got to go with Blake!
VILA: Which way did they go?
RALLI: The rocket silo. [Vila runs to door, then back]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/209/414 …

D05 - Animals
SERVALAN: I suggest you make sure that your connection with their disappearance is never discovered. Without any records to back you up, it might be hard to explain.
BORR: There's no cause for concern, Commissioner. I was - very discrete.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/405/222