Tootfinder

truly amazing: the sprawling serial novel by the late rick harris, aka thoughts on the dead, set in little aleppo, somewhere between springfield & macondo. literary fiction as text cartoon. wise & dark & so, so funny. sadly, only available from amazon print on demand: https://www.amazon.com/Book-No-…

The DST switch has two advantages: moving an hour of summer daylight we'd normally sleep through into our evenings, and reducing the variation in the time of sunrise (avoid dark mornings).
A 1-hour adjustment makes quite a big difference in middle latitudes. Too far south & the natural difference is too small; to far north it's too big for 1 hr to matter. South of 40°N and north of 60°N the argument is weaker. See the graph: at 40° the difference in sunrise time is 2h52, at…

Am I the only one who gets a little subversive thrill every time I type in my unnecessarily required birthdate as January first, 1970, knowing that somebody, somewhere, someday, maybe an AI, is going to expend a lot of effort trying to determine if a) that's my actual birthday, b) there's a bug in their signup processing, or c) I somehow hacked the web form to let me submit it without the date filled in?

From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of
self-defense doctrine
to substantive expansions of justified lethal force,
legislatures are delegating larger amounts of
“violence work”
to the private sphere.
These regulatory innovations layer on top of existing rules that broadly authorize private violence
—both defensive and offensive
—for self-protection and the ostensible maintenance of law and order.
Yet such significant authority…

THE NEW OUTLAWRY - Columbia Law Review
Introduction From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of self-defense doctrine to substantive expansions of justified lethal force, many red-state legislatures across the country are delegating larger amounts of “violence work” to the private sphere. In the wake of antiracism protests in summer 2020, Republican-dominated legislatures proposed a slew of such measures. The measures provide […]

Any sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from revolutionary dual power. This essay is a bit of a transition between the theory I've written earlier, and more concrete plans.
Even though I only touched on my life on the commune, it was hard not to write more. These are such weird spaces, with so much invisible opportunity. But they're also just so unique and special. For all the stress and uncertainty of making sure you stayed on Lorean's (the head priestess), there were also those long summer nights with the whole community (except the old lady) gathered around a fire, talking and drinking. There was almost a child-like play to the whole time.
There were so Fridays I'd come home with a couple of gallons of beer from the real world, folks would bring things from the garden, someone would grill a steak, everyone who didn't cook would clean up, and we'd just hang out and have fun. So many evenings I'd go over to Miles place with a guitar, or with his guitar, and we'd pass it around over a few beers, talking about philosophy, Star Wars, or some book or other. It's hard not to write about the strange magic of that space.
My partner and I bonded over similar experiences, mine on a weird little religious commune in California and theirs as a temporary worker at Omega Institute. Both had exploitation, people on weird power trips, frustrating dynamics, but also a strange magic and freedom. Both were sort of fantasy worlds, but places that let us see through this one, let us imagine something that something else is possible behind the veil.
There are many such veils.
Perhaps it's fitting that this is more meandering, as a good wander can help the transition between lots of hard thinking and lots of hard working.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/evaluating-options
Editing feedback (especially typos, spelling, grammar) is always welcome, as are questions and even wider structural advice. I've been adding the handles of folks who provide feedback to the intro in a "thank you" section. If you do help and wouldn't like to be added, please let me know.

Playing around with Antigravity, vibe coded a social media summarizer that makes a summary of the last 48 hours of my bluesky and mastodon timelines, using python, a local database of the posts on my laptop and APIs of mentioned services. Works greats after squashing some bugs and some iterations. Interestingly you need to know a little bit about coding to use it efficienctly, even in "vibecode" mode.
#AI

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

RE Mike Lee’s execrable proposal for "Pirates of the Caribbean "
a few days ago
—it’s bad, but
sadly in line with the right-wing movement to expand private actors’ privilege to use violence.
Darrell Miller wrote about this in what we called
“the new outlawry”
https://www.

THE NEW OUTLAWRY - Columbia Law Review
Introduction From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of self-defense doctrine to substantive expansions of justified lethal force, many red-state legislatures across the country are delegating larger amounts of “violence work” to the private sphere. In the wake of antiracism protests in summer 2020, Republican-dominated legislatures proposed a slew of such measures. The measures provide […]

Playing around with Antigravity, vibe coded a social media summarizer that makes a summary of the last 48 hours of my bluesky and mastodon timelines, using python, a local database of the posts on my laptop and APIs of mentioned services. Works greats after squashing some bugs and a few iterations. Interestingly you need to know a little bit about coding to use it efficienctly, even in "vibecode" mode.