Tootfinder

Science in Action will finish at the end of this month! I will miss it dearly.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/roland-pease-10678a59_private-eye-has-picked-up-on-the-news-that-activity-7303433572315508736-Pq3k

Private Eye has picked up on the news that Science in Action is to be dropped later this year from the BBC World Service, just one of several wide-ranging cost-cutting changes. Obviously, we're… | Roland Pease | 50 comments
Private Eye has picked up on the news that Science in Action is to be dropped later this year from the BBC World Service, just one of several wide-ranging cost-cutting changes. Obviously, we're trying to push back. It's not just that I love working on the programme, there are new discoveries and critical issues aplenty each week to dig into, but we try hard always to fulfil a need for our global audience, representing research from across the planet, and to dig deeper into the science than (say…

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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.
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

What a rubbish idea:
Large corporations already hide too much information from their shareholders and the public.
This would make that hiding easier and make company performance more opaque.
It doubles the time that corporate ill deeds and management failures can be hidden.
It is a dumb idea - but coming from one of the great scammers in our corporate world, we should be glad that he did not suggest yearly, or longer, reporting.
"Trump renews push to end co…

Trump renews push to end companies' quarterly reports
The US president urges regulators to adopt a semi-annual schedule for financial reports.

I think today's worker is the owner of the company, he certainly is the assessor.
He worked a lot later than those without the vested interest there. 😆 I finished work at my job before he did! 🤭
All the wood was sanded down and remaining nude wood given some paint. We have a test plank in the foreground of the first picture here which is painted with a second coat of paint. Seems likely we lose all the wood grain when doing that, and so will prefer the paler look where it's obviously made of wood not paint.
Won't really know for sure till it's dry. Prefer the colour a bit darker like that but if we're hiding the wood grain we might as well have used MDF instead of pine. We're after something clearly made of wood.
Another area is test-painted with just the clearcoat top varnish as a second layer. That's likely to be right, just a bit more shiny and protected.
The carpenter proper is back from holiday and starts tomorrow. He has a lot of drawers and doors to build and edging to attach to make the door panels. Still hoping at least the carpentry will be pretty much all done by the end of the week but likely some painting and touching up still to do next week. Hopefully by the end of Tuesday because I'm not really able to be here all day each day for most of the two weeks after that.

"""
Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Many of the details of the agreement reached after 3 days of indirect talks in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh remain unclear and challenges of implementing its terms are immense.
But in recent days, negotiators have closed gaps between Hamas and Israel over the details of the first phase of the 21-point plan announced by Trump in the White House last week.
It was not immediately certain whether the parties had made any progress on thornier questions about the futu…

In which NOAA more or less calls an end to the Earth/Sun excitement: #aurora night for the world will probably not be followed immediately by another great one. (This may be one of the few 'laws' of space weather predicting with a greater than 50% chance of being true. Been through that so many times by now I was actually not expecting much tonight ... d'oh.)

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

And when all these mechanisms — the “more just, more human systems” I’m talking about — fail to do their job, what can we do? Go to war, I guess? But I’m not happy about that. I don’t like war.
I am quite willing to celebrate a world without Kirk if in fact that’s what we get. (Last I heard was “critical condition.”) But I can’t get •that• happy about it. Whether we celebrate his death or denounce gun violence — both are important, both are appropriate! — we must above all notice the failure of everything that should have prevented us from even getting here. •That• is the real crisis.
/end

Is it talent?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQM0-w2jEOd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Duaa Izzidien - Visual Storyteller & Artist on Instagram: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I intend. But really that isn’t what matters. In Islam we say that actions are by intentions and that sometimes means letting go of controlling our outcomes. We can control our intentions, our effort, showing up - but we have to remember that the result doesn’t actually come from those actions. Sometimes the arrow misses because there’s a better lesson waiting or perhaps it’s to remind you to stay humble and remember that ‘you’ are not the architect of your success. Sometimes the painting goes “wrong” because it’s becoming something more beautiful than you imagined. Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned because there’s something different, better, round the corner for you. A huge thank you to @thabitoon_archers and @mamluk.academy for teaching me. You’ve taught me far more than just archery - you’ve taught me a rich history and life lessons that bring peace. (any mistakes in my form are entirely mine!). Want to learn how to use art as a tool for trusting and letting go of control? DM me ‘CREATE’ and I’ll show you these techniques. #showingisenough #trusttheprocess #archery #archerygirl #traditionalarchery #archerylife #overwhelm #personalgrowth #innerstrength #growthmindset #breakthrough #findingmyself #resilience #transformation #letgoofcontrol"
24K likes, 763 comments - duaaizzidien on October 24, 2025: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I …

Having just finished a 1-year consulting contract myself, my own list of restrictions for future jobs/consulting is very similar:
- will not work on adtech/surveillance/weapons
- will not knowingly make world worse and/or abet genocides
- will not be forced to use vibe coding (or will explain cost implications)
- prefer to work in the open
- prefer remote only
- flexible with time zones (last role was for a company in LA, -9h)

Joey de Villa 🪗 (@AccordionGuy@mastodon.cloud)
Attached: 1 image As long as we’re in the “September Surge” (that trend where there’s a noticeable uptick in job vacancies and hiring around September and October, when companies ramp up for year-end and the upcoming year), you might as well also ask “What DON’T I want in a new job?” https://www.globalnerdy.com/2025/09/06/what-dont-you-want-in-your-next-job/

"...one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’."
A #Nature journal editorial:
End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity

End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.

Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0,
we took the wrong path.
We’re now at a new crossroads,
one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society.
How can we learn from the mistakes of the past?
First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media.
The time to decide the go…

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

Not only was airfield at Bagram built in 1950s by Soviet Union, but potus was one who wanted US out of Afghanistan.
“It was Trump's administration that signed the peace agreement with the Taliban that paved the way for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan near the end of his first term.”
Bad things may well happen to US soldiers if potus follows through on this.
quote source:

"Look again at this small world. This is home. The only home we’ve ever known.
Every person who has ever lived. Every story ever told. Every love, every war, every sacrifice – it has all happened here on this tiny, drifting world.
And yet, we act as if there is another waiting for us. We carve borders into the land and fight over them. We build towers of wealth while others are left to starve.
We poison the water we drink, scorch the air we breathe and tear apart the very foundation of life, driven by the hunger for more, by the illusion of control.
We hold power over each other but not over the forces that could erase us in an instant. A rock adrift in space could end it all. A wave of fire from deep within the earth could rewrite the world in a single eruption. A burst of radiation from a distant sun could silence everything we’ve built.
In the face of the universe we are fragile beyond measure. Mere passengers on a planet that owes us nothing. And yet, we fight, we kill, we burn our home as if it were replaceable.
We act as though our time here is infinite. Though history has shown us otherwise. But for now this is all we have. Out there among the countless stars, there may be other worlds. Planets where life has taken root. Where others look up and wonder if they too are alone. But they are distant beyond our reach, beyond our time.
For the foreseeable future there is no second earth, no distant rescue. This is where we stand. This is where we make our living. What happens here, what we choose to destroy, what we choose to protect will echo long after we’re gone.
Think again how small we are. how brief our time is, how easily we could vanish. A fraction of a second in the lifespan of the universe, a blink in the endless dark. And yet in this fleeting moment we are here.
We love, we create, we shape the world around us. What we do with our time matters. Because in the end everything we leave behind is what we chose to built and who we chose to be. But for now we stand together on a mote of dust."
#Trance
#Techno
#AmbientTechno
#EnlusionLabel

PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation
Yanzhi Tian, Zeming Liu, Zhengyang Liu, Chong Feng, Xin Li, Heyan Huang, Yuhang Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05146

PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation
In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate images containing texts from one language to another. Current research of end-to-end IIMT mainly conducts on synthetic data, with simple background, single font, fixed text position, and bilingual translation, which can not fully reflect real world, causing a significant gap between the research and practical conditions. To facilitate research of IIMT in real-world scenarios, we explore Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation (II…

The comments are *overwhelmingly* anti-Bezos, and many express their intent to cancel subscriptions (I access through a library subscription, canceled my own).
Opinion | Trump replacing the White House East Wing is not the end of the world - The Washington Post
https://wapo.st/4o2FcGU

today in a german bakery, a woman asked for 8 slices of bread. when the employee asked, “would you like the end piece too?”, she said no.
8 slices? just wasting bread? #WTF
i’m not out every day (thank god), but every time i am, the world proves again how crazy it’s become.

Brutal similes
Using #AI is an ethical choice.
I know that there cases when an #LLM could make my job easier. Which doesn't mean I'll use one. Just like I won't be buying cheap junk gadgets that could help me with some random stuff a bunch of times before they'll end up on a trash pile.
Yes, sometimes I am curious what an LLM could come up with. But then, there are people who are curious how many donuts they can eat before throwing up. A waste of good donuts.
What world would you rather live in? One where you put a little more effort in your job? Or one where LLM helps with with your job, but you can't enjoy your free time anymore because the capitalists are using LLMs to turn every single aspect of your life into a nightmare, and eventually your employer just makes you do more and more until you're thrown out? But at least you will get a monthly trial of a statistical "friend" to "talk" about your trouble to.
Yeah, you can claim that training models does the most harm, and that's already happened, so not using them doesn't change much, and all the energy spent on it would be wasted. Or use the traditional "others" fallacy — others will use it anyway, others will fuel the vicious circle, so why renounce convenience. It's like when you learn that your dinner is human meat, and you decide to eat it anyway, because not eating it won't bring that human back to life, and if it's wasted, then their death will be for naught.
#AntiCapitalism

Haymarket Books has ebooks on sale for $2 until Nov. 7. Some of my favorite books published by them are:
Abolish Rent: on the potential of tenant organizing
Let This Radicalize You: a guide to activism over the long haul
No Cop City, No Cop World: lessons from Atlanta's Cop City fight
Perfect Victims: unpacks anti-Palestinian narratives you may not realize you've internalized

Haymarket Ebooks on sale for $2!
At Haymarket, our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements, and we believe that collective study plays a crucial role in sustaining engaged, effective, and durable left-wing organizations and communities. To that end, we aim to make our books accessible to anyone who might find them valuable. Until Friday, November 7th, ALL Haymarket ebooks are 80% Off. That means …

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

Oof, fuck microsoft.
But also, there's no reason to use permissive licenses any more. "Open source" has taken over the world. We no longer have to work with billion-dollar companies in order to get our stuff used. Now we need to protect ourselves from being taken advantage of by them.
https://

🎜 It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine 🎝 -- R.E.M.
As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity;
"Let's rewrite the entire operating system around AI."
https://…

As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity
Microsoft wants you to ditch your old OS so you can try its new one stuffed with overbearing, if not invasive, AI features.

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

#WritersCoffeeClub 23/9: How ‘self-reliant’ are you as a writer?
Extremely, but I try to open up to others and let them in. My reflexes are not helping, I'm kinda used to withdrawing into my own little corner of the world and shut the world out.
Outside influence, however, has always meant a better end-result, so I'm trying. I'm trying hard.