Tootfinder

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
—Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration

The first day of school means the first day in a while of having to deal with the parents who think their convenience is more important than everyone else's life. If you have to drive the little ones to school, please consider parking a block or two away and walking to the door instead of clogging the street in front of the school. And please, please just let that kid ride/walk by first. You can wait. I'm tired of having to defend my children from other parents in death machines.

MERCER ISLAND SCHOOL BOARD
Wow, you really do have to watch the downballot races. Mercer Island School Board has two (2) candidates (O'Callahan is and Gaspar) that are *both* software CTOs touting their "AI" credentials. Gaspar explicitly wants "free AI classes".
Here's a hint: The only "AI classes" that kids need are ones that teach them how to TURN ALL OF THAT SHIT OFF, and learn to think and write in their own words, not Chat-GPT'…

Clearly we need the police or ice to be at the doors of schools to summarily execute by gunshot the kids as they arrive to school the first day of the school year. This denies school shooters targets and satiates the police for at least five minutes. It is win-win.
Additionally, think of what we’ll save in school expenses for every subsequent year of school. This really is a no brainer. No common sense gun control laws needed.
/s

Selling stuff on eBay is so funny sometimes, like when someone extremely low-balls you and you decline their offer and then they message you with "What's your lowest?"
That's not how haggling works, you need to make a fair offer to the seller—it's a deeply human thing to negotiate about price, and both sides need to be respectful of each other.
I think haggling should be taught in school tbh. A real life skill.

do you teach public school in nyc? very excited to be on a panel at this day-long event for educators about using the grateful dead as a primary source, next friday, 11/7 at brooklyn bowl. (think it's only open to nyc teachers.) https://nycdoesocialstudies.eventsmart

Relief sculpture of rays of sunlight, a book, clouds and the kind of lamp that a genie lives in from the Newark Valley Central School
#photo #photography #architecture

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).

I’ve been playing correspondence chess with the mother of a high school friend of mine consistently for just over 40 years and she just passed away. It was a good run. ♟️ I think postcard stamps were $.13 when they started and they’re $.61 now.

Rachael Maddow: “I think the consistent sustained movement we have seen against Trump this year really has looked and felt different, not only from Trump’s first term, but also really from any other presidency ever.”
@maddowmaddow highlights new research from the Harvard Kennedy School, which finds the share of counties hosting at least one anti-Trump protest has risen markedly during Trump’s second term.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQO4IOQkW1u/

When I design physical objects, I think in boxes and simple, usually circular-section curves. This has been true when I freehand build physical objects, as well as when I model things on the computer. Fillets are about as crazy as I get.
I'm in awe of artists whose design imaginations extend to "organic" shapes.
Reminds me of music a bit. I was a reasonably good high school musician. Played multiple instruments; did fine in music competition on several of them. That's just en…

Just made a back to school collection on my Threadless store to suggest stuff I think people should get for the students in their lives, or themselves. So basically some shameless self promotion.
Enjoy: https://davidaugust.threadless.com/collections/back-to-school…

Shop the Back to School Collection on David August's Artist Shop | Featuring custom t-shirts, prints, and more
Whether you're heading to class, or just want to learn stuff this year, here's some inspiration by me.

Teenager has just suggested some of the programs, which I was under the impression were via the browser, may need to be on desktop.
This might mean Wine I guess?
And probably some kind of microsoft office install? I was hoping to get away with libreoffice..
Anybody have any experience with wine?
I will in any case have to contact the IT support at the school I think. I hope I am not the only parent doing so with the #EndOf10 .
Meanwhile, over on the laptop, the Linux Mint is installed (in danish even) and seems to be restarting without the USB
holding breath here...
🤞
13/n

Well I didn't expect my mother to be fixated on the idea that people think she's gay when I went to the hospital today 😄 I have a horrible feeling that as her mind succumbs to #MSA she's having boarding school flashbacks. While I can see the funny side of reassuring my mother that no-one thinks she's gay but that it wouldn't matter if she was, it's cruel if those days she's…

It's been a week since I watched this episode, and I still giggle at this scene about once per day.
[I read a lot of Mad Magazine in my youth.]

back when i was still in school i asked a classmate sitting next to me what should i be calling my machines. being a reenactor (I think? or something adjacent at least, it's been too long) she suggested Elder Futhark runes.
it was at least 5-10 years that passed between that and a realization that someone looking at my DNS zone without context would probably go "hm... is she secretly a nazi". anyway I phased the naming scheme out

I keep saying the same thing over and over with my kids: you don't make decisions with your voice, you make them with your body.
"I want to go to the park."
"Ok, put your shoes on."
"I want to go on my play date."
"Put on a jacket and get in the bike."
"I don't want to be late to school."
"I don't control time, if you don't want to be late you have to brush your teeth."
There's a fundamental truth underlying this concept though, one that I hadn't really thought about. On some level, I feel as though, any choice you can't make with your body isn't a real choice. If you're begging someone to do something for you, it's ultimately not something you control.
As I'm compelled, by threat of violence against my family, to pay for war against my comrades and to kill people I don't even know, I think about that. How far is our concept of freedom from the police state we are taught to imagine as the global beacon of liberty. My participation in the violence had always been compulsory.
Perhaps we could do better than just #NoKings.
#USPol

this is my fave pic I took I think

>As a transsexual myself I don’t understand where we went wrong. Old school trans people didn’t deny their biological. The fact that I acknowledge that I am still male, that I don’t think trans woman belong in female sports and we shouldn’t allow children under 18 to medically transition somehow makes me a transphobic trans person. It’s absolutely insanity and I don’t understand why today’s society believes this nonsense.
From a comment under

I think I shot these grass heads in the meadow above the Belle Sherman school looking across the basin of Cayuga Lake -- did you know grasses are flowering plants too?
#photo #photography #grass

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
—Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

🦾 Meet the teens behind RedSnapper: a smart Arduino-powered prosthetic arm
https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/08/21/meet-the-teens-behind-redsnapper-a-smart-arduino-powered-prosthetic-arm/

Meet the teens behind RedSnapper: a smart Arduino-powered prosthetic arm | Arduino Blog
An affordable, AI-assisted, wearable robotic arm? That’s not science fiction – it’s RedSnapper, an open-source prosthesis built by PAC Tech, a team of high school students from Istituto Maria Immacolata in Gorgonzola, Italy. Powered entirely by Arduino boards, their project won the national “Robot Arm Makers” title at the 2025 RomeCup – and we think […]

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
—Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
-Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration