Tootfinder

Just finished "Dawnrunner" written by Ram V, illustrated by Evan Cagle, with colors by Dave Stewart & Francesco Segala and lettering by Aditya Bidikar. It's a graphic novel that's heavily Evangelion-inspired, and while the artwork is *fantastic*, I felt that the story was kinda meh. The overall plot setup and big points were predictable, which I don't mind, but several of the details got lost or didn't bind into a coherent message, and the final philosophical conclusion doesn't stand up to the setting or even really make much sense. These days I'm finding myself with much less patience for sci-fi stuff that doesn't tackle social problems, presenting a society where they're driving forces but then not bothering to even try to ponder how they might get resolved. The art is as mentioned excellent though, so I won't say I disliked it overall...
#AmReading #ReadingNow

The case of “vegetative electron microscopy” illustrated here shows what is badly needed in current #LLM research and has implications far beyond. We need tools that help us curate huge corpora. We need to be able to trace #hallucinations back to the training data and understand what are the specific (to a sur…

A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data
Once errors creep into the AI knowledge base, they can be very hard to get out.

I really love this book, it’s really a great “New Year” story.
Wonderfully illustrated as well.

Just finished "Fitting Indian" by Jyoti Chand and Tara Anand.
Indirect CW: alcohol, self-harm, and suicide.
A graphic novel about mental health issues, being a second-generation Indian immigrant in America, international trauma, and both peer and family bullying. Beautifully illustrated and of course gripping given the subjects.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

If you, like me, enjoy sheer Gothic terror and early feminists wondering why we still have to protest this shit, maybe you'd like the two audiobooks I just released.
"On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror" https://amzn.to/45HoHsR
"The First Essay on the Political Rights of Wome…

Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law,
starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965
https://www.openculture.com/2025/11/the-illustrated-version-of-arlo-guthries-alices-restaurant.html

The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”: Watch Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving Counterculture Classic
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965.

2026 SheBelieves Cup at SI Stadium in NJ!
Canada vs Argentina at 12:30 p.m. ET United States vs Colombia at 3:30 p.m. ET
https://www.gothamfc.com/news/sports-illustrated-stadium-to-host-uswnt-shebelieves-cup

🪼 How the Discovery of Single-Celled Marine Organisms Resulted in One of the Most Influential Illustrated Books Ever Published
https://lithub.com/how-the-discovery-of-single-celled-marine-organis…

How the Discovery of Single-Celled Marine Organisms Resulted in One of the Most Influential Illustrated Books Ever Published
No creatures from the microscopic world have managed to captivate the human imagination as authoritatively as radiolarians. Since the late nineteenth century, they’ve made their existence known in …

This might explain why I keep thinking "I could have sworn I took more pictures than that" when I'm trying to take a lot of pictures to document a build in order to create illustrated instructions. 😦
https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/goog

@… FYI the bookshop.org link on your site takes me to this listing: https://bookshop.org/p/books/curiositi

A new investment thesis has spread through global markets at the start of 2026, as trading strategies long built on the primacy of the United States now opt for a new approach:
Sell America.
The sentiment started to take hold in financial circles after the shock of sky-high tariffs sent stocks and bonds into a tailspin last April,
but it has taken off recently as the Trump administration has pursued policies like attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence and threats of …

Sell America Is the New Trade on Wall Street
Investors are increasingly souring on the United States, as illustrated by the declining dollar, the stalled stock market and rising government borrowing costs.

Dutch answer to the removal of the boards at #Margraten US military cemetery, honoring black US soldiers who died while liberating the Netherlands in WWII. This grave injustice went counterproductive for the US government, as shown.
Courtesy to Dutch TV show ‘Even tot hier’ BNNVARA
#willyfjamesjr

This is of absolutely no importance whatsoever (which is why I’m mentioning it here, of course) but I’m wondering why Sports Illustrated magazine is obsessed with women’s swimming suits? I mean, I get why really, because you know, women wearing swim suits, but in the Apple News app it seems like every day there’s another article with a bunch of photos of women in swim suits. Do they even have articles about sports anymore? Should they just be honest and change the name of their magazine?

A loose sentence formed with but can usually be converted into a periodic sentence formed with although, as illustrated under Rule 4.
#page42

Has your favorite album vanished from the music streaming service of choice again? I highly recommend ripping your CDs and making them available through @… with the @… app; it really works great on iOS & macOS!

Just finished "The Daughters of Ys", a graphic novel written by M.T. Anderson and illustrated by Jo Rioux. Is apparently a telling on an ancient Breton legend, which explains some of the narrative devices and plot choices. The drawings are beautiful and the tale is interesting, but takes a royalty-focused and -friendly perspective I've grown unfond of at this stage in my life.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

RE: https://mastodon.social/@exkclamation/115915413295406873
This photo looks like an illustrated 70s or 80s record cover. wow!

this soundtrack of the 1967 dudley moore flick "bedazzled" is not only great, it's amazing: the music is written and performed by dudley moore, so now i absolutely have to see this movie

Metropolitana VII - Markings 💮
城 VII - 印记 💮
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford Pan 100
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Just finished "Pearl" written by Sherri L. Smith and illustrated by Christine Norrie, based at least in part on "Hiroshima in the Morning", a memoir by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. A concise, wonderfully-illustrated, and fascinating story of a Hawaiian-born girl sent to visit her dying great-grandmother in Japan in 1941 and then trapped there throughout World War 2. I won't spoil things beyond that, but the book digs deep into the horrors of the war on both sides, showing just how cruel the geological ambitions of nations can be to people who belong to both cultures.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Infinite-dimensional Lagrange-Dirac systems with boundary energy flow II: Field theories with bundle-valued forms
Fran\c{c}ois Gay-Balmaz, \'Alvaro Rodr\'iguez Abella, Hiroaki Yoshimura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05687 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05687 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.05687
arXiv:2511.05687v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Part I of this paper introduced the infinite dimensional Lagrange--Dirac theory for physical systems on the space of differential forms over a smooth manifold with boundary. This approach is particularly well-suited for systems involving energy exchange through the boundary, as it is built upon a restricted dual space -a vector subspace of the topological dual of the configuration space- that captures information about both the interior dynamics and boundary interactions. Consequently, the resulting dynamical equations naturally incorporate boundary energy flow. In this second part, the theory is extended to encompass vector-bundle-valued differential forms and non-Abelian gauge theories. To account for two commonly used forms of energy flux and boundary power densities, we introduce two distinct but equivalent formulations of the restricted dual. The results are derived from both geometric and variational viewpoints and are illustrated through applications to matter and gauge field theories. The interaction between gauge and matter fields is also addressed, along with the associated boundary conditions, applied to the case of the Yang-Mills-Higgs equations.
toXiv_bot_toot

Multi state neurons
Robert Worden
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08815 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08815 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08815
arXiv:2512.08815v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neurons, as eukaryotic cells, have powerful internal computation capabilities. One neuron can have many distinct states, and brains can use this capability. Processes of neuron growth and maintenance use chemical signalling between cell bodies and synapses, ferrying chemical messengers over microtubules and actin fibres within cells. These processes are computations which, while slower than neural electrical signalling, could allow any neuron to change its state over intervals of seconds or minutes. Based on its state, a single neuron can selectively de-activate some of its synapses, sculpting a dynamic neural net from the static neural connections of the brain. Without this dynamic selection, the static neural networks in brains are too amorphous and dilute to do the computations of neural cognitive models. The use of multi-state neurons in animal brains is illustrated in hierarchical Bayesian object recognition. Multi-state neurons may support a design which is more efficient than two-state neurons, and scales better as object complexity increases. Brains could have evolved to use multi-state neurons. Multi-state neurons could be used in artificial neural networks, to use a kind of non-Hebbian learning which is faster and more focused and controllable than traditional neural net learning. This possibility has not yet been explored in computational models.
toXiv_bot_toot

Yesterday I finished "The Other Side of Tomorrow" written by Tina Cho and illustrated by Deb JJ Lee. Lee's "In Limbo" was an excellent graphic memoir, and this similarly has wonderful art, although I didn't make the connection until checking the authors after reading to the end.
This book is a realistic fictional account of two childrens' escape from North Korea via China, Laos, and ultimately Thailand where they could declare themselves refugees at a US embassy and get sponsored to live in America. Along the way they're helped by various members of the Asian Underground Railroad. I'll avoid spoilers but yet definitely encounter difficulties along the way.
The ending definitely hits different now (while also accentuating my disgust with the current US regime). Like "Libertad" that I also finished recently, the "escape to the US at the end" plot line is going to become less prevalent going forward, although Libertad involved a good measure of complexity around that point.
I was a bit disappointed in one of the later plot points where a different and more-real-world-probable turn of events could have served as a better message for society, with the "lucky" outcome as written reinforcing regressive notions of family, and as an ex-Christian the Christian elements of the story made me feel a way. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist though, and can respect the idea that those willing to risk torture and death for their faith have every right to stand by it and take inspiration from it. Most (very valid) critiques of big western Church institutions just don't apply to underground churches in northern China who are helping people escape the horrors of deep fascism.
Overall a really good book.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Just finished "Far Sector" written by N. K. Jemisin and illustrated by Jamal Campbell. I don't normally go for Marvel/DC comics stuff and this was a good reminder why. Jemisin's authorship was the draw for me here, as well as some curiosity about what I might be missing out on by avoiding the classic comics lineage. I won't go into too much detail about particulars, but suffice to say it ends up feeling to me line a very neoliberal story dressed up in a veneer of radicalism, which is not what I'd expected of Jemisin. Particularly in light of current events, the "good cops" aspects of the storyline ring truly hollow. There's still a lot of neat parts, but I guess I also wound up disappointed by the sci-fi aspects in a lot off ways. I truly think Jemisin is capable of better than this, based on her other (excellent) work.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Just finished "Dream On" written by Shannon Hale and illustrated by Marcela Cespedes with colors by Lark Pien. It's a wonderful book about grade-school friendships and dealing with unhealthy social pressures.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

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