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

Documents: AI music startup Suno has spent $32M on compute power and $2,000 on data, such as music, to train its model since January 2024 (Kristin Robinson/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/suno-creates-spotify-catalog-music-two-weeks-pitch-deck/…

Suno Creates an Entire Spotify Catalog’s Worth of Music Every Two Weeks, Says Investor Pitch Deck for $250M Fundraise
Suno has raised $250 million in a quest to become a "verticalized" creation, social media and streaming service, according to an investor deck.

I don't think I'm ever going to enjoy gifts.
I can get why people would give them to children. After all, children don't have their own budget. However, I'm talking about occasional gifts, not a new toy every second week, because "we must outcompete the other grandparents". But to adults?
Once I've heard that you should gift people with what they won't buy themselves. Well, that's won't work for me. I'm a minimalist. If I don't need something, I don't want to have it. Unnecessary junk is only emotional burden to me.
I can get why you'd enjoy something handmade. But something people bought? If I need something, I can buy it myself, when I need it. And I definitely don't need people to prove to me that they never cared to learn who I am, and just buy whatever they like or whatever is "fashionable"; which usually means exactly the opposite of what I'd prefer (i.e. something minimalistic). Or even worse, I don't need people manipulating me through gifts.
Sweets? Besides my diabetes, I don't really enjoy expensive shit that people generally buy because it's what's advertised. For the money they waste on it, I'd buy three times as much sweets I'd actually enjoy.
Gift cards? Oh yes, "you aren't supposed to give money, so let's just give the equivalent of money that's actually worth less than money". Actual money? And here we reach the true nonsense; we exchange the same amount of money, so it's just pointless gesture. Unless one of us gives less money…
What I'd really like, as a gift? Maybe that people would finally bother accepting me as who I am. The absolute minimum of caring that I hate consumerism, and not fueling it "for me".
#AntiCapitalism #minimalism #ActuallyAutistic

I usually post in the evening today's post inthe morning for the 'Fotovorschlag' somehow broke my routine.
Anyways, I wanted to share this photo from my hike on sunday. It was my first winter-hike this season! Saturday was a great cloud inversion - which I missed - sunday greeted me (and QUITE some more hikers) with a plain blue sky.
I hope I can get out again on the weekend to test warmer socks.
Well - enjoy!

Looks like USPS is rehearsing for the midterms. Thousands of absentee ballots ... where are they? No one knows.
https://www.wtoc.com/2025/10/24/some-chatham-county-voters-may-receive-two-absentee-bal…

Neue EU-Regeln: Bargeld im Supermarkt abheben und mehr Schutz
Bargeld im Supermarkt abheben – auch ohne Einkauf. Das soll für Verbraucher in der EU künftig möglich sein, zudem sollen sie besser vor Betrug geschützt werden.

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

Hey friends. Also a photo from my hike last Sunday. I came to this hut and tried a counter light. In summer there are usually quite a few people as you can buy some drinks there.
Now.. I had some time to play around with some perspectives. I just liked the silence in the photo. Especially as all others just quickly passed the spot without a lot of notice.
#photography

Microsofts Copilot und andere KI-Chatbots müssen WhatsApp Anfang 2026 verlassen
Neue Nutzungsbedingungen von Meta verbieten die Integration Künstlicher Intelligenz von Drittanbietern in WhatsApp. Microsoft verweist auf eigene Copilot-Apps.

My contribution to #footpathFriday , just fresh from the press ;-)
I went to the local hill / mountain today to escape the fog / clouds. Well and also to see whether the fog would create some nice mood to capture along the way that I'm walking rather often.
And indeed it was a very pleasant experience to walk into the fog and breaking through it to see some blue sky.