Tootfinder

Worked with an #acting #coaching client on some material and played with Bogart's Viewpoints of Tempo and Duration. Beautiful seeing them finding new ways of being and new things to pursue in their character. Opened up a whole inner life.

Just finished reading "The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi. I had already watched the anime, but it had been so king I didn't remember all the details. While the anime was great, the book is even better, and it's going to be high on my list of things to recommend to my children when they're old enough to read for fun.
The neurodivergent representation is cool, as is the deep central question of interspecies bonds and the political possibilities and dangers they entail. Uehashi handles the exploration of that question well in my judgment, including appropriate ambiguity without muddying moral clarity. Elin is a truly fantastic protagonist, not without flaws but nevertheless a excellent role model and a very sympathetic figure without being pitiful.
One thing I really love about Uehashi's writing is that she's not shy about using interior narration to tell the reader directly what a variety of characters are feeling, but when she does this she focuses on human contradictions, quirks, and weaknesses that make those characters feel much richer, and that remind the reader of all the ways our weird and sometimes contradictory or inexplicable quirks guide our actions just as much as both logical thought and predictable/expected feelings. None of the characters is an unerring source of wisdom, with every grand principle presented shown to have its weaknesses and biases, and even the wisest characters making mistakes and learning from them.
Overall, a wonderful book, and having also seen the "Seirei no Moribito" anime but not read the books, I'm excited to dig into more of Uehashi's extensive catalog.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Just started listening to this one, and I'd absolutely recommend it. It's great.
It's really hard to explain how complicated beliefs can be, especially to folks in an urban bubble. The truth is, part of my anarchism came from listening to #rural folks. I didn't really live in a big city until I was like 18, but I came to those places already with a set of liberal biases.
Some of the things I experienced in those places pushed me towards being a Communist. But there are some strangely anarchistic tenancies, even in those who profess to be politically the opposite.
My stance on guns was largely shaped by understanding and extending the arguments of rural gun owners. They continued to evolve long after, but it took actually listening to break through my liberal biases and understand the ways in which gun control can actually intersect with other forms of oppression. There is a lot more nuance than I had grown up to believe.
And it goes both ways. Conservative gun owners have absolutely no intellectual against anarchist gun arguments. They're generally either gonna fall into racism that you can talk about, or start to radicalize left. There are plenty of similar pathways.
But also, not everyone in rural areas is conservative. There are plenty of rural anarchists and communists. They just get buried under stereotypes.
Anyway, this has been great to listen to and I'd recommend it.
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/strangers-podcast/talking-to-rural-conservatives

If you set limits for a scale (e.g. x-axis) in ggplot, how would you like data outside of that range be handled? There is the oob parameter for that and a set of functions to use with it: https://scales.r-lib.org/reference/oob.html

Do Republicans actually think #veganism disqualifies a person for political responsibilities?
Apparently, when you look at how these candidates reacted.
A Talarico spokesperson issued an official response to
“vegan accusations”
(“accusations” – the word you’d use for say, corruption or sexual assault):
a picture of him wrapping his face around a giant hunk of meat.

Why is ‘vegan’ suddenly being used as a slur?
US republicans are tarnishing their plant-eating opponents at every opportunity. Yet vegans are perfectly suited to hold power – let me count the ways, writes Emma Beddington

Rant ahoy!!
I stumbled onto the Wikipedia article about foundational psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. I'd forgotten how angry this trash scam practice of woo-woo muckspreader firehose insanity makes me. It's not so much that someone's built a huge castle in the air, because there's a place for fantasy and worldbuilding and daydreams; that's where we get much of our culture from, after all. It's the waste of time and money, and the unaddressed or exacerbated human misery it represents. It's the duplicitous and meritricious posing as being in some way scientific, or reality-based. Psychoanalysts belong in the same circle of hell as mediums who claim to be in contact with people's deceased love ones, or selling colloidal silver as a cure for cancer. Preying on vulnerable people with snake oil, hokum, religious cults and all the other ways the simple-minded are exploited boils my piss. The apparent fact that most of them sincerely believe their garbage doesn't ameliorate their guilt in my book.

Friday Links 26-24
I liked the "Border Collie" post today, the podcast about air conditioning in Europe, and the interview with Mike D.
https://christof.damian.net/2026/07/friday-links-26-24.html

We’ve been dealing with the climate as an isolated, almost linear concept,
where it’s a problem with a fix.
But not a single nation stuck to the Paris agreement.
People are getting solar panels, but we’re all using more carbon-emitting fossil fuels as well
– our habits aren’t changing.
We’re still trapped in the mindset that caused the problem in the first place:
believing in infinite growth, and that we don’t have to change our ways of being.
A ci…

Your worst fears about cultural collapse might be true – here’s what you can do about it
Writer Sarah Wilson argues we’re hurtling toward the same end as ancient Rome and the Mayan civilisation – but there’s plenty to fight for

Alan Kay’s original “Dynabook” vision superficially resembles modern laptops and tablets — uncannily resembles in many ways! — but it’s the opposite in one important respect:
Our modern devices are beautifully designed, hermetically sealed products in which there is a strong vendor / user hierarchy.
The Dynabook, as I understand it, would be the opposite of hermetically sealed. It arrives not as a finished design, but as a starting point. Embedded in that “for children” ethos is the idea of play, tinkering, scribbling, making a mess and cleaning it up — and thus the idea of devices being •reshapable•.
(Image source, with lots of commentary from Kay: https://www.quora.com/American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/answer/Alan-Kay-11)
5/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116788242133509166
It's inherent to LLMs that they produce garbage—it's not fixable, because text generation based on statistics has no concept of right or wrong or true or false.
Therefore it's only (partially) useful in a small subset of use cases that have other ways of enforcing veracity—namely programming, by literally looping over itself until the code is syntactically correct, it doesn't call non-existing APIs and the expected output for a specific input happens.*
Even then the code may 1. only cover the specific test cases asked of the LLM and fail for others or 2. the LLM may get stuck in an endless loop if it can't get the code to run or work.
*The programming use case also has a lot of other intrinsic and extrinsic factors that make it work better than most other text generation applications; for example a large amount of training data of mostly working code and that the languages being generated are both many orders of magnitude simpler in structure than human languages and mathematically unambiguous.**
**Except for Perl of course

Just finished "Amazona" by Canizales (indirect trigger warning: rape). An excellent fictional graphic novel about the displacement of indigenous people from the Amazon in Columbia. I especially liked the dedication: "Dedicated to those who have had to flee, leaving their lives behind. May the light in their hearts never fade. May it light new paths, so its brightness can blind the greedy. Early on the refugees, hosted in a city, comment that they now need money, when before if they had a need they could just take what they needed from the jungle. The book doesn't make this point, but communities like that have been living that way for tens of thousands of years, and I have hope that those ways of life will continue, at least where not yet destroyed, for tens of thousands more years, if not millions or billions of years. I am myself not a primitivist, despite being an anarchist, but I think there are nevertheless a plethora of important perspectives to be seen if one pays attention to indigenous groups around the world.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

This is so incredibly good it deserves to be reproduced in full: 😆 🔥 😆
“Carney pointed to a map of North America, half of which had been accurately but artistically burned away.
“It is our intention for the pipeline to cross over Saskatchewan and British Columbia, but if they prove too charred already then I plan to divert the pipeline and profits through the Northern states, as part of my next round of capitulations to Trump in CUSMA negotiations.”
Danielle Smith, smiling so wide that many in the audience naturally assumed she was thinking about forcing trans children to dig the pipeline infrastructure themselves, stated that she fully supported the project being moved up before her province was so full of smoke it couldn’t exist anymore.
“This is a great day for Albertans, and none of the rest of you traitorous fucks,” Smith stated, flipping off any reporter who looked like they were from east of her province. “The sooner this gets done, the sooner I can start looking for new ways to hurt endangered wildlife and complain about how no one ever gives Alberta anything.”
#carney #canpoli #cdnpoli #abpoli #climatechange #bcwildfire #endfossilfuels #traitor #theAmericanFascist #trans
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2026/08/carney-vows-to-fast-track-west-coast-pipeline-before-entire-west-coast-burns-to-the-ground/

Just finished "Rialto" by Kate Milford. A wonderful book with a *lot* of things to like but also a few I wish had been done differently.
Starting with the good stuff, an #OwnVoices portrayal of anxiety depression is always welcome, *especially* one that portrays positive coping strategies, including active therapy, and complex but ultimately supportive family dynamics. Dad & daughter each reminding each other to use calming strategies at different points in the book was lovely, and getting to see the complexities of the trying to be a supportive sibling was great! Larger than that aspect, portraying a YA adventure in which the parents are actively involved but don't spoil things is so great and must have been difficult to pull off. Most YA stuff quickly ushers the parents out of the picture, and this fails to provide any kind of positive or negative role model for parent/child interaction. This book had ample examples of the former, *and* let the kids have plenty of agency too. Excellent stuff that I absolutely want to see more of.
So what didn't I like?
First, as an anarchist, I always hate to see unapologetically positive (and thus drastically unrealistic) portrayals of the police. Without getting into spoilers, even the stuff about the Piepowder court bothered me. It's presented here as a cutesy alternate court tradition, but I can't help but speculate that these courts were likely not always fair in practice, and the whole "single person makes immediate judgments model" from this book is terrible in general. I just don't like positive portrayals of terrible systems that happen to be good because the people involved are good people, since they reinforce harmful positive mental models of "justice" that don't apply to the real world. This element wasn't enough to totally spoil the book for me (the plot could have mostly functioned without it) but it's a downside to me.
Second, the book is set in rural Missouri, and has plenty of Black characters. Yay for representation? Certainly better than the cast being all-white given the setting. But the book doesn't have any Black *culture* that I picked up on, and it chooses to try to completely sidestep the relevant history. Maybe I'm just not attuned to elements that were there; if anyone who read this did see them feel free to point them out. The history definitely isn't there though... for example, was the park segregated, or not? During the time it was active one imagines most parks would have been, and that if it hadn't been that would have been a very important difference, which would even have been relevant to the plot and themes of the book as written.
Now perhaps this critique is unfair because Black children and young adults *should* get to see themselves portrayed in cozy fantasies without things always having to be about racism... In a choice between erasing Black characters and erasing racism (and especially racist histories) maybe there's no right answer here and this is fine, actually. My instinct tells me that there are ways to do better, though, and that presenting a history with all the racism carefully elided isn't the greatest compromise to make here.
A while ago I read "Under the Heron's Light" by Randi Pink. It also has mythical animal guides, a Southern setting, helpful family members, a multi-generational mystery to solve, and a (slightly older) teen protagonist who is up to the task. In contrast, it is all about racist history, and takes us through multiple extremely harrowing scenes from the past.
In any case, this discomfort also wasn't a deal-breaker for me, in part because, as I said, I think it's probably good for Black children to see uncomplicatedly positive representations of people like them alongside the plenty of stuff out there that does get deep into the racism and history. I also don't have the best perspective to judge this stuff, although that doesn't mean I should default to "it's probably fine" (I'd be happy to hear from anyone who feels they have a better perspective on this, about this book or the trend in general...).
Overall, I enjoyed Rialto quite a lot. I don't think it quite makes it into my top tier of recommendations for my kids, but I think it does make the list somewhere.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon