Tootfinder

Just wrote an article about Presidential Incapacity, and you can read it (and while you're there, please subscribe to get articles and satire and other good stuff I write and make first).
https://stuff.davidaugust.com/presidential-incapacity/

Presidential Incapacity
We know already he can't do good things. Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President

Sources at CBS News say newsroom morale is extremely low ahead of Bari Weiss' imminent arrival, and employees worry about her lack of experience as layoffs loom (Justin Baragona/The Independent)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a

‘It’s not a good place right now’: CBS News staffers are ‘literally freaking out’ about Bari Weiss taking over newsroom
EXCLUSIVE: ‘People are using words like depressing and doomsday – feels like some sort of doomsday,’ one source told The Independent about the mood inside CBS News right now.

'It's not a good place right now': CBS News staffers are 'literally freaking out' about Bari Weiss taking over newsroom (Justin Baragona/The Independent)
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/cbs-news-bari-weiss-editor-reaction-b2839064.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251003/p110#a251003p110

Of course, my default will always be "keep things out of the government so those things can't be held hostage" but that's a longer term goal. First, understand the situation then figure out how to respond.
Now that everyone is good and scared, and realizing that a whole chunk of the population can suddenly go without food, I'm gonna remind everyone that the time to learn to grow food and forage is not *when the food runs out*. It's in the years before that.
Here's a fun place to start with foraging....
https://youtube.com/@blackforager

@… IMO it *should* in an ideal world reside somewhere entirely outside of any nation state. Like DC is supposed to not be in any state.
But barring our leaders ever actually getting together and figuring that out (Fat chance), outside the U.S. would be a good place to start.

Good Morning #Canada
Summer may be over, at least emotionally, but there's lots of nice weather as we enter Fall Fair season in Canada. Canada has incredible agricultural potential in every province - and maybe we need a series of posts on that - and fall is when rural communities celebrate the harvest with demonstrations and competitions. But city folk are invited and encouraged to visit your local event and get acquainted with plowing matches, the price of a new tractor, cattle judging, and who has the biggest watermelons. Here's a small list of some of the most prominent Fall Fairs out of the hundreds that take place annually.
BTW - In my only plant submission to one of these festivals (Erin Fall Fair), I got 3rd place for the tallest sunflower. Rookie mistake, I cut my plant at ground level, and it was 11.5 feet high. The winners ahead of me dug out the roots and submitted the entire plant. I was robbed!
#CanadaIsAwesome #FallFairs #Farming
https://www.mapquest.com/travel/the-12-best-fall-fairs-in-canada/

So many people are scared of underwater sea creatures. Only place with good chances to house alien life in our solar system is the moon Europa, under countless of layers of ice in an entirely underwater world awaits.
We are absolutely not ready.

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

You may (or may not) recall the #Freenode takeover mess. However, thanks to #IRC being an open and widely supported protocol, many projects migrated to #LiberaChat with as little disruption as possible.
Good news is, your walled garden is unlikely to suffer the fate of Freenode — because it already is there, from day one. What are you going to do when your project suddenly gets banned and you lose access to everything — including all the data that you shouldn't have kept there in the first place? Of course, come up with some corporate bullshit of "join us on our illustrious journey to the next walled garden, and don't forget to install another 200 MiB privacy nightmare app not to be excluded from our community".
#Discord

Well, a little success, a little failure.
The box with a NeoPixel matrix on the back and a USB battery inside (and a microcontroller) works great!
But I did not bungee it to the bike rack so it flew off, hit the road, the lid broke off, and the MIK adapter also broke.
I bungee corded it into place and it's good now... but the box is busted so I'll have to come up with another solution.

If #LFC can get their defense sorted, I think the rest will snap into place better. Kerkez has looked uneven, but I thought defensively he was pretty good tonight.
I'd rather see Bradley start with Robbo and Kerkez rotating. Frimpong available as a sub, pace for the late push against tiring opposition.
And until Konate gets right, there is no stability. It exposes everyone else. Van Dij…

My main takeaway from the #jsd2025 was that A.I. is "just another tool". A.I. tools/agents simply amplify your existing workflows. You can't improve a bad process by sprinkling A.I around.
So y'all have to make it work for humans to do good and efficient work at first. All the best practices we know about need to be in place. If you achieved *that* your humans can …

Good morning from a rainy place! Friday morning, the weekend is near!

Interesting observation by Langdon Winner regarding technological transformation: “by the time the issue of ‘use’ comes up for consideration at all, many of the most interesting questions involved in how technologies are constituted and how they affect what we do are settled or sub-merged.”
This is happening right now with #GenAI .

Good Morning #Canada
In July 1871, the City of Victoria officially became the capital of British Columbia, when the province joined the rest of Canada. At the time, the city was larger than Vancouver and had served as the most important settlement in the area for decades. The Colony of Vancouver Island also stamped their little feet and demanded that Victoria be designated as the capital in return for the island to join with the mainland to become part of Canada. Captain James Cook was the first British person to set foot on Vancouver Island in 1778, and in 1843, Fort Victoria was established by the Hudson's Bay Company. There is a long history of Vancouver Island serving as a naval base, and today, Victoria is the home of Canada’s Pacific Coast naval and military headquarters in nearby Esquimalt. Victoria is a top tourist destination and is regularly rated top 5 worldwide as an awesome place to live.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianCapitals
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/victoria-bc

If you liked A Good Place then you will like Man on the Inside. Began watching it last night and really loving the series.

Must Try Milwaukee: Pizza:
Chuck’s Place, in Thiensville, not Milwaukee? Eh...
Flour Girl & Flame - Good pizza! Need to try the Detroit style on the next visit.
San Giorgio - Good pizza! My last visit was ruined by an asshole though.
Classic Slice - Love it! Haven't been there in a while though.
Hup’s Pizza - Haven't tried... not convinced I should.
Wy'east Pizza - Haven't tried because my partner went without me and was not impressed.

Must Try Milwaukee: Pizza
Snag yourself a slice from one of these must-try spots.

„Gen-AI amplifies: Whats good for humans is good for AI.!
The good practices and habits we already have ensure significant better Al results.“
#jsd2025

The unsettling rise of athlete stalkers, plus an NFL QB debate https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6548086/2025/08/12/the-unsettling-rise-of-athlete-stalkers-plus-an-nfl-qb-debate/

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
BLAKE: Just wondered how good you really were.
AVON: Don't try and manipulate me, Blake.
BLAKE: Now why should I try and do that?
AVON: You need my help.
BLAKE: Only if you can open the doors.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/185…

Security measures for Gen #AI seem to increase all around, which is overall good.
It's just sad to think about WHY statements like "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image does not currently support editing images of children" are necessary in the first place.
#nanobanana

this week on the good ol’ #GratefulDead cast, we flip the side on “blues for allah” & get into “crazy fingers,” legit one of my favorite dead studio cuts, capturing a delicate place that virtually all live versions (outside 1975) miss. https://…

There are at least two Aotearoa native grass skinks in this picture... Can you see them?
#Herptophile

If you're free Wednesday night in SF, check out this panel on social housing at 518 Valencia. Sounds like it'll be good (I unfortunately can't make it):
Wed, Oct 22, 7:30pm
Social Housing: Challenging YIMBYs and NIMBYs
"What we’re doing on housing isn’t working. We’ve upzoned, streamlined, deregulated. And still, the crisis deepens. There is a movement waiting to be built—...rooted in care, solidarity, and the belief that everyone deserves a place to live.&qu…

Air quality map of the entire planet. Apparently Earth is mostly not a good place to breathe right now.
Is this…normal? I haven’t seen this kind of simultaneous global AQI map before, and wonder how typical this is for August (in the past decade, century, millennium).
(Source: https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map Turn off stations & fires on the right side to get the image below.)

Kevin Durant Has Surprisingly High Praise for Cowboys, Despite Rival Fandom https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/kevin-durant-surprisingly-high-praise/?adt_ei=[email]

Finished reading "The Lilac People" by Milo Todd today. It's a good story, but I did find myself crying quite a few times. It's compelling historical fiction that should be more widely known, but it's not the emotional place I want to be right now.
I want more hope, more empowerment. The US is in a dark place right now, but in uncertainty, there is the opportunity for positive change as well. We can all feel the tipping point, and I hope, despite the inadequacy of…

Bad things are happening, but so are good ones. Demonstrations and protests across the country this last weekend did not get much press coverage from large outlets, but they happened. People are showing up. And they show us that Americans are not going gently into that good night, but are raging against the dying of the light. And more and more people each day are organizing and pushing back against this autocratic breakthrough.

Presidential Incapacity
We know already he can't do good things. Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President

Really the best?
There are over a million people living in the city of Prague. It’s one of the most touristy places in Europe and, in my eyes, probably the most beautiful place Europe has to offer.
But man! There’s something that bothers me more than a pimple on my ass: bike apps.
For context—Google Maps doesn’t offer bike navigation here, Apple Maps only added it in the last update, and Mapy (the Czech app) does a good job with hikes and all the rest—but not with bikes.

#coffeeneuring ride 3, combined with #DrumAndBassOnTheBike
I visited a coffee place I used to have lunch at. It seems to have changed owners, but the coffee is still good.
The croissant, not so much.

Good Morning #Canada
On this day in 1950, the first mountain rescue by helicopter in Canada took place. Albert David Flowers, a BC Forestry fire lookout man, suffered a leg injury at the Azure Mountain Lookout. He was accompanied by his son Gerald Flowers, who was 15 years old. They radioed for help, and a 2-seater open cockpit helicopter was dispatched from a local mining site. The 15 year old Gerald had to cut down trees to prepare a landing site. There was no room for the teen in the helicopter, so he then undertook a 2-day 45km hike off the mountain.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Helicopter
https://www.barrierestarjournal.com/columns/valley-voices-wells-gray-park-helicopter-rescue-makes-history-in-1950-8027471

Today I’m a very proud and happy open standards maintainer: OpenAPI 3.2 is now available! The release notes are a good place to find out what’s new (it’s a lot!) https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/releases
Huge thanks to our contributor community, you are amazing!!

Good luck to those receiving their A-level results today. From personal experience - if you don't get the place you hoped for, you could still get the place that's best.
#AlevelResults

So this got me thinking:
Starter primers:
Andor: Leftism/resistance
Barbie: Feminism
Matrix: Philosophy
Good Place: Ethics/Moral Philosophy
Sesame Street: Coexistence
Mr. Rogers: Empathy
Gillian’s Island: Capitalist Theory
https://youtu.be/rsRjQDrDnY8

#LB Lindíssimo este desenho. Esse @… é mesmo muito talentoso.
https://

Baltimore, Penn State and the pressure of being oh so close https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6563329/2025/08/20/ravens-penn-state-football-the-pulse/

I got „Pilgrim In The Microworld“ from the library after seeing this Jacob Geller essay and it’s absolutely brilliant so far!
https://youtu.be/cSrP1ipkes0

What you truly need to vibe and thrive is simple, some good food to nourish your body, clean water to keep your spirit flowing, a little movement to keep the energy dancing, and a cozy spot to rest your head. When you’re living in community, sharing the love and looking out for each other, all that falls beautifully into place.
What you don’t need is a giant screen flashing noise at you, the newest shiny gadgets or games, or getting caught up in the endless swirl of political drama. Re…

Finally finished throwing together a central place for my own posts on the AI Hype Movement plus links to other good stuff. If you need a central place to point someone curious as to why you don't use AI and/or why they shouldn't, feel free to send people here:
#AI #LLMs #GenAI

Explicit formulas for the Bessel models: odd general spin groups
Yu Xin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03278 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03278

Explicit formulas for the Bessel models: odd general spin groups
Let $F$ be a non-archimedean local field of characteristic zero. In this work, we study the Bessel model for $\GSpin_{2n+1}$, extending a result of Bump, Friedberg and Furusawa. In particular, we obtain explicit formulas for the unramified Bessel functions. These formulas have a global application to a Rankin--Selberg integral of the $L$-function for $\GSpin_{2n+1} \times \GL_n$, generalizing a construction of Furusawa. We compute the local factor of the global integral at a good place. Moreove…

About a year too late I'd say, but I'm sure she made a good buck running the place deep into the ground…
https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/dr-jean-innes-step-down-ceo-alan-turing-institute

I ordered a tshirt from an online place today. I chose paypal. I finished filling out the paypal login, then clicked "checkout" and it said "Your cart is empty!" Umm.. what? I got annoyed and went and did something else. 15 minutes later I got confirmation I purchased that tshirt. WTF? Good workflow there....

Also, it's always interesting to see how things are designed and go together.
Both of these have a mechanism where when you slide the electronics into the cylinder that putting the set screw in place pushes the PCB up so the button goes into the hold of the cylinder.
I thought that was a clever design choice!
One of them is really nice and the other is really cheap. (The good one is a SNV4 PRO.)

I got an email from the local chain pizza place, advertising $0.34 pizzas, thought that might be a good treat for lunch, and then realized that I need to spend $14 on breadsticks to get that. I really don't need that much carby food.

Compilations and samplers from record labels and such *should* be really great ways of finding new artists in theory. But it's strange, I almost never end up listening to compilations or samplers. I think maybe some of it is because all those artists and recording levels all over the place is a little stressful and overwhelming, and I also think it's because I usually end up focusing on LPs (or EPs or singles) from just one artist at a time. Even splits are supposed to be good for ge…

Series D, Episode 04 - Stardrive
DAYNA: Vila. This place is like some kind of underground maze.
VILA: We seem to have hit on some sort of a hangar. This is not a good place to be, Dayna.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/404/263 B7B2

Remember a few weeks ago I made a Facebook account with the intent of only using it for Marketplace because there are no good options around here for selling stuff.
I can happily report that zuck has not sucked me into his algorithm! But that doesn't mean I haven’t noticed his algorithm at work.
I happened to tap the 'home' button yesterday.
You know what it was?
Charlie Kirk
literally top to bottom.... every story and post was about him. Nothing close to my community. Nothing related to anything else.
Just Kirk.
holy ____ am I glad to be on Mastodon/Fediverse. And god we are so ____ as long as billions of people are exposed to that place.
And just to be clear... my only activity on there is through Marketplace. I don't have any friends, no groups, nothing else that I think would impact the algorithm. So as far as I know, I'm a virgin user to FB's algorithm. And that's what I got.
#CharlieKirk #Algorithm #Facebook #DumpZuck

Tom Brady roasts Jets fans during Patriots statue ceremony https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6543432/2025/08/09/tom-brady-patriots-statue-jets-roast/

Day 11: Bee Johnson
As promised, back to printed books, and since I hadn't yet done any authors of picture or board books, here's one. It looks like Johnson is primarily an illustrator and has only written a single kids' book, but it's a magnificent one: "What Can A Mess Make?"
Naturally, the illustrations are rich and evocative, but it's also got one of my favorite formats (just a few lines per page, with consistent meter and rhymes throughout) and has the incredibly charming theme of two sisters who are constantly making messes, except it highlights the fun (and other emotions) they get out of their messy play, reminding parents cleaning up messes that there's a benefit to letting your kids make the mess in the first place, which is an idea that's stuck with me as I clean up my own kids' messes. This book checks *all* of my boxes for a good picture book (which is kinda hard).
#20AuthorsNoMen
P.S. at this point, I think I've exhausted the range of "author" definitions I wanted to include in my list, and I've now got the unenviable task of balancing between genres and trying to hit some of my favorite authors before we get to 20. We'll see how that goes...