Tootfinder

CBS has cut two streaming shows, disbanded its race and culture unit, eliminated the Johannesburg bureau; all eight on-air correspondents cut were women (Justin Baragona/The Independent)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cbs-news-l…

CBS News fired 8 on-air personalities in latest layoffs under new leader Bari Weiss. All of them are women
EXCLUSIVE: Multiple sources told The Independent that senior foreign correspondent Debora Patta was added to the layoff list following a last-minute change by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai
Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Pume Tuchinda, Lalita Lowphansirikul, Surapon Nonesung, Panuthep Tasawong, Alham Fikri Aji, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Sarana Nutanong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15239…

WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai
Large language models excel at instruction-following in English, but their performance in low-resource languages like Thai remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks often rely on translations, missing cultural and domain-specific nuances needed for real-world use. We present WangchanThaiInstruct, a human-authored Thai dataset for evaluation and instruction tuning, covering four professional domains and seven task types. Created through a multi-stage quality control process with annotators, dom…

love when a trans woman's completely culturally disconnected from cis women due to muh anxiety or whatever, yet inevitably pushed with the same tides due to being a woman in the same circumstances, so she winds up repeating mainstream instagram feminist platitudes as if they were fresh, but with the word "trans" tacked on for no reason. "if you're a trans woman you need to learn how to trust your gut feeling on things"

My grandfather was as a full-on Nazi in World War II.
When he died, I was glad that he was gone.
Today, fascism is rising again and many are falling for its empty promises.
Don’t live your life in a way that your children and grandchildren will hate you.

Meinerz talks the culture being built in Denver, Hufanga looks ahead to Week 8 https://www.denverbroncos.com/video/meinerz-talks-the-culture-being-built-in-denver-hufanga-looks-ahead-to-week-8-broncos-in-60…

Noteworthy in that the headline is calling out the driver, rather than the vehicle.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/19/maryland-car-ramming-children-party?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Noteworthy in that the headline is calling out the driver, rather than the vehicle.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/19/maryland-car-ramming-children-party?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

Filtering for Creativity: Adaptive Prompting for Multilingual Riddle Generation in LLMs
Duy Le, Kent Ziti, Evan Girard-Sun, Sean O'Brien, Vasu Sharma, Kevin Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18709

Filtering for Creativity: Adaptive Prompting for Multilingual Riddle Generation in LLMs
Multilingual riddle generation challenges large language models (LLMs) to balance cultural fluency with creative abstraction. Standard prompting strategies -- zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought -- tend to reuse memorized riddles or perform shallow paraphrasing. We introduce Adaptive Originality Filtering (AOF), a prompting framework that filters redundant generations using cosine-based similarity rejection, while enforcing lexical novelty and cross-lingual fidelity. Evaluated across three LL…