Tootfinder

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 …

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

while we're mourning the soon-shuttered @… blog, station manager ken's post about the very weird professional blacklist snitch harvey matusow (who ratted on pete seeger) is a big part of what set me on the path to write a book about the weavers.

Harvey Matusow: The Biggest Snitch in American History (MP3s)
So how did the "most hated man in America" relax after destroying the lives of hundreds of innocent Americans, giving LSD to Robert F. Kennedy, tangling with Roy Cohn and becoming prison buddies with Wilhelm Reich? By moving to England...

Probing nuclear structure with the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation in full impact-parameter dependence
J. Cepila, M. Matas, M. Vaculciak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02115 https://

Probing nuclear structure with the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation in full impact-parameter dependence
Building on the newly available solution of the Balitsky-Kovchegov (BK) equation with the full impact-parameter dependence, we extend the study of parton evolution from proton to nuclear targets. Since a key part of the scientific programme for future experimental facilities such as the EIC is to study gluon dynamics and shed new light on the phenomenon of parton saturation, we present predictions for key processes, such as deep-inelastic scattering or the diffractive production of vector meson…

#ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

Day 10: Stacey Mason
Another academic, but this time one of my compatriots; we overlapped at UC Santa Cruz as advisees of Michael Mates, and even collaborated on a Twitch stream called ScholarsPlay for a bit, although we never coauthored any papers. We did chat about our research, and I had many good discussions with her about agency in interactive fiction, a topic we both published on. Her paper "On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives" (#20AuthorsNoMen

Machine Learning Powered Feasible Path Framework with Adaptive Sampling for Black-box Optimization
Zixuan Zhang, Xiaowei Song, Jiaming Li, Yujiao Zeng, Yaling Nie, Min Zhu, Dongyun Lu, Yibo Zhang, Xin Xiao, Jie Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21077

Machine Learning Powered Feasible Path Framework with Adaptive Sampling for Black-box Optimization
Black-box optimization (BBO) involves functions that are unknown, inexact and/or expensive-to-evaluate. Existing BBO algorithms face several challenges, including high computational cost from extensive evaluations, difficulty in handling complex constraints, lacking theoretical convergence guarantees and/or instability due to large solution quality variation. In this work, a machine learning-powered feasible path optimization framework (MLFP) is proposed for general BBO problems including compl…

Sources: Microsoft is trying to poach Meta's AI talent, is making multimillion-dollar offers, with a mandate to match Meta's compensation for top talent (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-trying-poa…

Microsoft is trying to poach Meta AI talent, documents show
The company has compiled a list of its most-wanted Meta engineers and researchers, part of an effort to be more competitive in the AI talent wars.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#TheEarlyMusicShow
- The Medici Popes - Part 2: The most unfortunate of Popes
Hannah French with the second of two programmes exploring the lives of two 16th Century Popes: Leo X and Clement VII, and the music that surrounded them.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002jfyz

I think the Vibecoding reddit has accidentally stumbled on the best description of vibecoding:
It's "roleplay for guys [it is always guys] who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part".
(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/com…