One of the hidden gems of being on Fedi is that people here are, generally, not falling for the LLM hype. So we don't get much in the way of deepfake videos, or other AI slop, coming down our timelines (or at least, I certainly don't; no one I follow is making or boosting AI slop). I was just watching a video warning about this, and the creator said "we've probably all been swarmed by those ads using deepfakes to push dodgy financial schemes" - I'm like, what? we have? - "and further, deepfakes of politicians all over social media, being pushed in front of us". Again, I"m thinking "Wow, that's not my experience of social media." But this is my only social media site, really. I don't count Discord; those are basically closed systems. They don't push anything in front of you you didn't already want there. Which just struck me as interesting. Throw in a really good ad-blocker, and I just don't see any of this shit going around. And, à propos de rien, I use a web client for Fedi. Which means I get to see my adblocker adding up all the ads it's blocked at the top of each page. I love coming over to the Fedi tab, because the adblocker counter remains firmly locked on zero.

"Who would choose to be trans?" More and more, I'm thinking I would. Yes, it has meant more than half my life I've been fighting transphobia. Yes, it has led to physical damage and scars I still bear. Yes, it has led to mental trauma that will always haunt me. And still...I think I would choose this. In this community, I can have an effect. I can actively work to make things better for my people, in any way I want to. I have that freedom because I've long since gotten used to the poverty, and comfortable with living under it. The big change I'd make in my life (other than transitioning earlier, which, yeah, I think many of us feel that one) is that I'd ignore the rat-bastards at the gender clinic, and jump straight into the trans community back in 1992. I waited 30 years before I finally took that plunge, and it's by far the biggest regret I have, is that I lost all that time being among my people. Because my people are smart, funny, caring, insightful, pretty, handsome, sexy either way, and just generally pretty fantastic folk. I know there are exceptions, but I don't have to deal with most of those. Instead I get a community that looks after one another, lifts each other up, mentors new members of the community. That will support one another against the very weight of an entire government, a world of governments, that hate us and wish we would go away. The average trans person among this community knows more about their own medical care than most doctors. Knows how to navigate the byzantine stupid laws and hoops we have to jump to be ourselves. And most of us are, pretty reliably, well left of centre politically. We believe in social-benefit goals for a living system, rather than Line Go Up For Bigger Dragon Hoard goals. In other words, if you carefully constructed a fictional community of trans people? It probably wouldn't be as good as the real thing. So who would choose this? Me.

Hi! New activism. I'm interrupting my weekend off to ask if there are any people out there with the time and energy to compile a list of recently-passed US laws, state by state and federally, which are aimed at oppressing trans people? I'm asking because I *think* we have a second potential US trans person's asylum claim to press in Canada, and I want to arm the immigration lawyer with a lot of references to the effects of state and federal laws in restricting trans and nonbinary people from living. It's possible this already exists. If it does, and you know about it, by all means lay it on me, sibling. If not, the urgency on this would be a few weeks, maybe a month? If a team of folk want to work on it and divide the work, that's awesome too. However you want to work it. I'm organising a team to help this person. What we're going to need, first and foremost, are donors. Do we have anyone who might be able to contribute to a fund for this person? They've been thrown out of the marital home by a racist and abusive husband, and have only a couple of hundred dollars in their account, while they sleep at a shelter. If you can help, DM me here or contact me on Signal at oldladyplays.11, and mention ZB as your sign of what you're here about. Second, a longer shot. This one's open to anyone in or around the Kamloops area. Our potential asylee is currently in a shelter in the 'loops, and it'd sure be nice if we could get them out of there. If you know anyone who could put up a tenant for what could be several months, I'm going to be trying to raise money to provide rent to such a person. They don't need a lot - a bed, a room, a dresser maybe? Even a small one? Again, a DM here with non-Fedi contact info, or requesting mine, will serve, or again Signal at oldladyplays.11 My other tasks I can accomplish by other means, but those two I could really use help with. #Kamloops #TransMutualAid

A thought about public transit. Why do we have to pay for it? We built it. It was our tax money and our labour and our commonly-held land. The buses and trains we bought, we paid for. The people who drive them? We pay that. So why do we charge people to use it? We don't charge road users to use the roads. "We pay for them," the drivers say. "So do we pay for them," say I. "We have to have insurance!" "So do transit vehicles." "We have to pay for our go-juice of choice!" "Us too." "We have to pay to maintain our own vehicles." "Yep, that's a pain for us too." So why, exactly, do we provide use of the roads free to people who have the money to have their own vehicle, but NOT to the people who *don't* have that money, or choose not to spend it on a car for all kinds of society-benefiting reasons? It's ridiculous. In order to facilitate the fare collection, we have to have MORE POLICE in our lives, people going up and down the LRT trains, bothering people trying to journey, and writing expensive tickets if they find someone forgot to tap their card on the out-of-the-way pedestals for such. How many hundreds of thousands are we paying in the salary for that couple of dozen people? Do we come even CLOSE to recovering that money by catching so-called "fare cheats"? No. Nothing like it. It's a big ripoff, in favour of individual car use, and allows them to underfund our public transit so that it can take me an hour and a quarter to get to an appointment a private vehicle could reach in fifteen minutes, because it's about five km from my apartment. But in our rattletrap system, that's 3 buses. This kind of thinking is burning our planet and our people alive. And still we hem and haw about whether it's worth the expenditure, and make it easy for people to live 100+km from their place of work - and yet still attend every day. Madness!