Tootfinder

People who think asexuality is not real are just rightfully insulted for needing someone else to realize that what they consider to be “normal” is just one of many ways of being.

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

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

Better Being Me
Discover how our executive functioning, neural pathways and brain mapping open up new, innovative ways of BE-ing that will forever change the way you relate to yourself and the world around you...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/better

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

I have been playing CONTROL Resonant since the day after it came out (grrr, screwed up pre-load with last minute patch being a full image, not a delta).
It's an AWESOME game! Crunchy action melee combat, with several ways you upgrade and change what you can do. Choices through a talent tree. Choice of primary & secondary weapons, plus a finisher, and then add on abilities as well. Lots of synergies between it all.
The main story is what you'd expect from Remedy, f…

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

@… @… It’s sort of beautifully subversive as a statement, the implication being colonialism can only play out in two ways: You succeed and become a large empire, or you can’t possibly have done colonialism …

RE: https://dair-community.social/@ZekuZelalem/117320888712641893
There's a bit of context behind this that's worth being aware of, and I'll do my best to explain it second (or third) hand. Abiy Ahmed has been the prime minister of Ethiopia since 2019. He was quite popular initially, but has held on to power for quite a while and has been called out for authoritarian tendencies.
His party, the Prosperity Party, is a liberal party that has privatized parts of the economy and is trying to dismantle ethnic federalism. This type of "modernization" is obviously supported by neoliberal forces around the world, especially since he took over from the ethno nationalist ML TPLF.
The TPLF was also authoritarian, brutal, and anti-democratic, as one would expect from an ML organization. Part of Abiy's popularity came from opposition to the TPLF. But more recently, but his forces also carried out genocide in Tigray during that war in 2022 (after his Nobel Peace Prize).
Part of the opposition to his modernization is that ending ethnic federalism would weaken the power of older ethnic structures. This could be seen as similar in some ways to conflicts across Europe in from 1848 through to the early 1900's and in the Balkans after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The connection between ethnicity and nationality has never really stopped causing problems. Liberalism is usually connected to the domination of one ethnic group into a singular national identity. This flows from the French Revolution, through the Russian revolution, and into both the Ethnic ML exported by Communist Russia as part of their attempts to weaken European capitalism and (via both American Colonial Nationalism and the French Revolution) into the Neoliberalism promoted by the US and European powers as a counter.
Ethiopia is a multiethnic country. Unfortunately the logic of the state (liberal or communist) tends to destroy these ethnic identities through a combination of ethnic cleansing, appropriation, and (often forced) integration.
Some of the conflict here is coming out of the tension between a national identity and ethnic identity, especially in relation to Tigray and Amhara, as well as the continued pressure of economic liberalization, and centralization vs federalization.
The point is that it's actually quite a bit more complicated than it may be presented as, especially outside of the religion. European interests may align with Abiy, and present him as a "modernizing force." Addis is one of the centers of the African Union. Meanwhile, other countries have their own interests in stoking this conflict. China, Turkey, the UAE, and Iran all sell drones to the Federal government. Eretria has an interest in creating a buffer zone to keep Ethiopia from seizing a port city from them. Sudan is involved, and I don't have the local political depth to know why.
Various groups will try to point to one group or another as the "good guy/bad guy" but it's definitely not that simple. It's just kind of tragic for everyone. I hope Ethiopian people find peace and freedom.
My hope is that Ethiopia will develop something like Democratic Confederalism that resolves these conflicts and tensions without wiping out the unique identities of the peoples who make up Ethiopia.

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

The recurring theme of "where do we put the Device Tree?" keeps haunting LPC.
It is such a tough nut to crack when two or more components that are being developed mostly independently, but not fully, ought to consume and extend it in different ways. 🤔
I advocate for holistic views and not caring about breakages; always do full system upgrades including #firmware.
That requires a very sophisticated upgrade path, but it's doable, I think. It only works with a shift in mindsets though.

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

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