Tootfinder

deep new project by john brackett, @…, examining documents from the #GratefulDead business archive at UC santa cruz. he's got a new scholarly book out in the spring about "touch of grey" (!!). his last was…

"Hauling items for the mob": "Independent promotion companies," payola, and "Touch of Grey" (1987)
This is a document that I examine in my forthcoming book, Touch of Grey, or, How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars (forthcoming spring 2026 from Duke University Press).

Evidence for an Instability-induced Binary Merger in the Double-peaked, Helium-rich Type IIn #Supernova 2023zkd: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adea38/meta -> UC Santa Cruz-based survey uses AI to spot explosive stellar death by black hole: https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/08/black-hole-supernova/ - machine learning enables real-time detection of fleeting anomalies before they fade away.

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