@whitequark@mastodon.social2025-10-28 01:33:27
if you want something fun to happen, run `c filt _ZN8iloveyouIS_S_S_S_S_EIS0_S0_S0_S0_S0_EIS1_S1_S1_S1_S1_EIS2_S2_S2_S2_S2_EIS3_S3_S3_S3_S3_EIS4_S4_S4_S4_S4_EIS5_S5_S5_S5_S5_EIS6_S6_S6_S6_S6_EIS7_S7_S7_S7_S7_EIS8_S8_S8_S8_S8_EIS9_S9_S9_S9_S9_EE`
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2025-08-28 10:45:00
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-11-28 10:59:39
Right, folks, so there is an account on mastodon.social (@8124@mastodon.social) that has been libelling me and others, defaming us as antisemites for the longest time.
They just sent the posts attached.
They have been reported to mastodon.social and I have raised my concerns with them and yet no action has been taken against that account even though the account has been suspended on at least three major Mastodon servers and limited on at least four others.
It is not limited…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-11-27 06:23:28
Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, according to a transcript of the Oct. 14 call published by the Bloomberg news service,
advised Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov that Putin should call Trump to congratulate him for the Gaza peace deal,
say Russia had supported it and that he respects the president as a man of peace.
“From that, it’s going to be a really good call,” Witkoff said according to the transcript.
When asked by Russian state media to comment on Bloomberg’s…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-27 03:00:46
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
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-11-27 09:39:16
Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-09-27 11:47:54
Folks, please remember that while our focus this week has been on trying to get the families stuck under Israel’s bombs in the North to relative safety in the South, our families in the South need your continued support for the basic necessities of life.
You’ll remember Aseel as she was our very first Gaza Verified member.
Every week, she tries to raise $500 so she can feed her family of six.
Her fundraiser isn’t doing too well this week.
(She still has a little over …
@cdarwin@c.im2025-09-27 20:14:12
Veteran U.S. attorney in California insisted Border Patrol follow a court order.
Then she was fired
The top prosecutor in Sacramento said she was fired after telling Border Patrol they could not carry out indiscriminate immigration raids around Sacramento this summer.
Michele Beckwith, a career prosecutor,
said she reminded a Border Patrol chief that a judge had issued an injunction in California’s Central Valley.
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2025-11-27 11:11:00
heise | Günstiger Wärmepumpen-Strom: So halten Sie die Energiekosten klein
Ein Zähler oder zwei? Pauschaler oder prozentualer Rabatt? Wir vergleichen die neuen Optionen für Wärmepumpen-Strom und zeigen die Vor- und Nachteile auf.
@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-28 01:57:48
Heather Honey,
a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election,
has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure.
Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell,
a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results.
In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’…
