Tootfinder

Recently I’ve been thinking about taking a step back from my friendship with my mom, maybe just talking to her less.
Sometimes I honestly wonder if I’m just misinterpreting things, but it really seems like she’s uncomfortable with me being fucking queer, especially with me hanging around other queer people at my local gay bar. She’ll question who I’m with and lately it feels like she’s always picking at my life choices. I can’t tell if it’s just me being sensitive, or if she’s actually…

Top stuff. Would read again.
“On inclusive personas and inclusive user research”
https://ericwbailey.website/published/on-inclusive-personas-and-inclusive-user-research/
Gonna stuff this into my next ‘Selfish Accessibility’ talk …

On inclusive personas and inclusive user research
Personas as a contemporary practice are inherently tokenizing and reductionist.

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

is it just me, or did keyboard controls for video players stop working on macOS Safari a while ago? pressing k or space to pause works, but pressing again just jumps forward one frame or something instead of resuming. disabling all content blockers doesn't help & having the same problem on Nebula oO
EDIT: it was just me! I had the StopTheMadness For Web Apps extension active!

Went to Skšl for lunch and they gave me the staff meal, which was a smoked salmon with whipped cream cheese and micro herbs and pickled onions. Like if a bagel and lox had grown up.

Series C, Episode 08 - Rumours of Death
SULA: Then stop talking like a fool. Do you seriously imagine I have any personal regard for that woman? Doesn't it occur to you that I might hate her more than any of you precisely because I do know her?
HOB: So let's cut her throat and be done with it.
https://blake.torpidity.n…

I'm getting excited to see a bunch of people in person and eat good food in Montreal!
(Will be there for #IETF124 and some ATProto Community stuff)

New work laptop. I don't want to sign it into my #Apple account for obvious reasons.
Connect my Apple trackpad to the new work machine and it works fine.
Try to reconnect the trackpad to my personal Mac so I can do some homelab stuff over the weekend, not so fine. It shows up in the BT menu, but won't actually connect until I have the laptop forget the device.
Ok, I think, I'll just connect it wired since I only use the trackpad at my desk at home anyway.
That doesn't work because why would you want to be able to plug in a device with a wire and have it Just Work when instead you could get to fuck around with Bluetooth.
And of course I get to do the forget device bullshit again in order to use it with my work laptop today

Another excellent thread from @… I especially agree with this bit:
"The EU needs to get the *hell* off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments"
Not easy for even a motivated person to achieve without a lot of help though. Yet.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115271300104707706
pluralistic@mamot.fr - Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/25/apple-calls-for-changes-to-anti-monopoly-laws-and-says-it-may-stop-shipping-to-the-eu
 
1/

Just finished "Check Please" book 1 by Ngozi Ukazu. I had some complaints about "Barda" by Ukazu, but this was great! It's a graphic novel about a college hockey team (and some other thing I won't spoil). I loved the character design, pacing, and overall comfy vibes with a dose of heartwarming threaded through and bits of drama that are clearly going to come into play in further books which I'll be grabbing on my next trip to the library.
The one thing I wish had been present was a more honest struggle with rape culture in college sports & frats / frat-adjacent spaces. I'm not saying every book about such spaces has to have these things happen, but I think there's a thin line between writing a more perfect present as a good example and papering over serious problems for the sake of reader/author comfort in a way that ends up helping diminish and this perpetuate the issue. With all of the social media stuff in the book, it could easily (in terms of space, not writing difficulty) have had a subplot about events at another college or in an adjacent social group to show the teammates' reactions and perhaps even let some of them work through some patriarchal attitudes about things. We'll see it it comes up in later books.
#AmReading #ReadingNow