Trump merchandise is insane.

Catch 22 isn’t about illegal orders. The contradiction is more about your own sanity/safety.

That number of articles is still pretty impressive. I’d rather have fewer, high quality articles, than millions of terrible quality AI articles.

The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can add articles! It also wouldn’t be too difficult to “translate” regular Wikipedia articles to simple ones. You could even use AI tools to help - there are text leveler tools that will help you recognize which words lower level readers would struggle with and can help you make those changes. But this cannot be an automated process.

I’ve done graduate level course work on modifying text for “EMLs” - “emerging multilingual learners.” (“ELL” is still okay, but lots of folks in the field prefer EML because it is prioritizing the students “assets.”) I’ve made several assignments for students with reading difficulties. When I did experiment a bit with AI tools to help me with this process, I had to do a lot of fine tuning to get an acceptable product.

Tbh, you just convinced me right now that I should start adding more articles myself.

Discworld explores gender a few times in a way that I like.

Monstrous Regiment is about a bunch of women who pretend to be men to join their military. For the most part - these aren’t trans characters, they identify as female. The funny is the characters slowly discovering that everyone else in their group is doing the same thing. One character though, explicitly identifies as male after the “reveal” and has male pronouns used for them.

Discworld as a series tends to be irreverent without punching down. Comedy is a weapon in Pratchett’s hands, but his targets are capitalism and oppressive systems.

LeGuin has a lot of interesting takes on gender. The Hainnish cycle is about a race of humans who had previously colonized a bunch of planets and did lots of experimentation on those populations - kinda Vault Tec vibes. The civilization collapses/gets better, and the POV character is usually some type of researcher/anthropologist looking at how those planets develop The Left Hand of Darkness is a sci fi classic: a planet where people stay sexless until they go into “heat” and will develop the opposite genitals of the person who they are attracted to. There’s lots of switching back and forth. It’s a big deal when the king gets pregnant, because only children the king carries can inherit the throne.

Any LeGuin is good. Earthsea is a far superior children’s series compared to Harry Potter. Nothing that really makes it explicitly trans but the process of finding your true name and accepting yourself is something that resonated very much with me. (Also props to LeGuin for being very forceful with insisting that the characters not be depicted as white. None of this pussyfooting retroactive “I never said Hermione was white!”)

Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy is also more gender bending sci fi. Everyone is “she.” The first book was part of the Sad Puppies drama, because it won Hugo’s and absolutely pissed a bunch of a bunch of chuds.

Yeah - tbh the name sucks. I hate recommending it to students, because it feels like I’m calling them dumb.

But yes 100%. Instead of doing dumb AI shit, they should be advertising what they already have.

Thats why I mentioned Simple Wikipedia.

This is far more readable that what an AI generated version of the article would make.

Those Americans with a 6th grade reading level or less are precisely the people who shouldn’t be reading AI summaries. They’ll lack the critical thinking and reading skills to catch on to garbage.

Simple Wikipedia already exists and is great.

The same could be said of to-do lists, right? But I still like having an app with a checklist, because my phone is always with me and a piece of paper is not.

When I did have periods (thank god for testosterone), I had a really difficult time keeping track of them and they were often very irregular. The app I used helped me pick up patterns and would warn me when I needed to be prepped. My dysphoria cope was pretending that they didn’t happen ever, so it was helpful to have that occasional “hey, pack some pads today” as a notification without constantly checking a calendar.

You know, I am fighting pretty fucking hard, but I’m not inclined to brag about it online. I’m sorry as a little tranny in Oklahoma that I can’t end fascism.

They gave like $100k to the traitor Ashli Babbitt’s family too. Probably more than the family of a soldier who dies in service gets.

A militia with death benefits.

Broke/desperate/high schooler. Mom and dad probably won’t notice if the Benadryl goes missing. The Hat Man makes sure that you only make that mistake once.

Think about how many kids huffed banana peels because of some text file Anarchist Cookbook they found online. There are probably dumbasses that fell for jenkum.

Is no one allowed to have fun anymore?

I’ve gotten chased out of my profession and have no social life because I’m a queer man surrounded by MAGA. There are certain parts of my state that I can’t travel to any more, because if the wrong cop pulled me over I’d be another dead removed in a ditch.

I’m sorry I’m not fighting hard enough for you.

I have a not-quite-physics degree (I could not mentally bring myself to do the proper physics capstone, but I basically have a physics degree.) I have had multiple conversations with astrophysicists, astronauts, and people who know their shit.

It has always been abundantly clear to me that he has been full of shit. I had to play coy a lot because I had some association with NASA, but the man does not know shit about rockets or physics and it’s always been abundantly clear to anyone who does.

I doubt he could do a simple kinematics problem.

I honestly believe that part of the crisis in mental health care that’s universal across southern states is that therapists seem to think that therapy is supposed to look like his show.

I went through the hell of a troubled teen program - like the kid diddling Turnabout Ranch he sent kids to - and so much of my experiences with psychological care have been an attempt to force me into being something more “socially acceptable.” Not recognizing that my brain works differently than others, not helping me find coping strategies, but just telling me “you need more grit and to force yourself to make eye contact!”

His show presents bullying as “mental health care” - and this has seriously hampered the practice.

As a trans man, I would be happy to have a child. My uterus still works, as much as I would suffer going off of testosterone enough to carry, it is something I have always wanted.

Unfortunately, these people have made it legal for me to be fired for being trans. They have voted for politicians that have done nothing to address the catastrophic state of medical care which renders it prohibitively expensive to realistically ever be able to care for a child.

I believe that children deserve stable living conditions and a future, which does not seem to be something that they are concerned with at all.

DemocracyNow! has been pretty good for a long time. Although maybe you wouldn’t call them “major” - but they were on cable TV for at least some time where I live.

Amy Goodman got arrested at the 2008 GOP convention and the Dakota pipeline. Very good bona fides.

I’m an Okie. My great great grandfather raped and impregnated his daughter, which no one had a real issue with or did anything about.

But you can be damn sure any gay man in eastern Oklahoma at that time was going to end up in a ditch.

“States’ rights” has always been a bullshit lie. The confederacy did not honor states rights. The constitution explicitly instituted slavery as an institution an individual state could not abolish.

Lol I have $100 in my bank account until Friday, and my car is 300 miles past an oil change at this point. (Yay for my abusive ex husband getting the divorce decree to leave me in permanent hell debt I’ll never escape!) I’m probably going to have to sell off my 3DS and most of the games I own to get through the week. A steam deck is a pipe dream.