Tootfinder

RE: https://mastodon.social/@TinJar/115758861139891392
As someone who writes primarilly science fiction, I'm quite used to write stuff nobody wants to read, so nothing will change, really.

Those injection-bruised hands ....
https://www.bbc.com/bbcthree/article/347828f8-6e7f-4a9b-92ab-95f637a9dc2e

Mage session:
The un-awakened teenager, whose brother had been abducted and imprisoned by their parents, has just spotted them for the first time since her brother vanished. She runs at them, yelling a battle cry on the top of her lungs.
Storyteller: »Is somebody trying to stop her?«
The Euthanatoi social worker: »Can I possess her with a spirit of vengeance?«
#rpg

Yesterday I finished "A First Time for Everything" by Dan Santant. A lovely autobiographical graphic novel about a summer foreign exchange trip between middle and high school with plenty of awkwardness but also some romance.
It perfectly captures the state of an awkward but also self-aware pre-teen/young teenager, and the various international escapades depicted are both hilarious and touching. Also fascinating to read about international travel circa 1989, which in many ways was comparable to stuff I remember from late in the 90s: parents seeing you off at the gate; expected to navigate a foreign city with just a map, etc.
A really fun book.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Really should stop calling it personal computing and call it what is, mainframe timesharing.

Oh my fucking god, will you stop AI-shittifying my work?!
(At least there is an option to change settings an opt out of AI-enabled features. But stop this, just stop).

"Russia’s export of liquefied natural gas from the Arctic is the last major financial artery keeping Putin’s war machine alive — and the G7 must cut it now, before it expands to become a #climate killer." #LNG #Russia

‘We Must Stop Tinkering Around the Edges’: Van Hollen Makes Case for Medicare for All Amid ACA Fight | Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/news/van-hollen-medicare-for-all

No, shitty jobs with shitty pay are not "designed" to give teenagers a way to get started earning some spending money. They're designed to send fat profits to people who aren't doing the shitty jobs.
Minimum wage is a cruel joke. Fix it.

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