thegoldencatscafe

[thegoldencatscafe]

The premise of Skyrim is just so funny. The shouts are just dragon language, making the fights between dragons basically an argument? But now this puny human has a minimal grasp of the vocab. Imagine you're disagreeing with your bud about something unimportant like pineapple on pizza and then a mouse came running over and called you a bitch

[thegoldencatscafe]

theres too many pokemon games where you play as a kid whos full of life and full of potential. there needs to be a pokemon game where you play as a college dropout who lives in a shitty apartment

[thegoldencatscafe]

If you experienced trauma in childhood or had a rough childhood, dude listen to me. Offer yourself play. You were deprived of it.

Keep bubbles in the house, blow bubbles in the yard, blow them in your room, get a coloring book that doesn’t have to be an adult one with mandalas, watch cartoons, laugh at stupid things, dress up as a superhero for Halloween, wear a Santa hat on Christmas and big light up snowflake earrings, lay down on the floor, lay down in the grass, eat eggos for dinner sometimes. It’s not stupid. You’re not childish. You’re giving your inner child what they had taken from them. They deserve it.

[thegoldencatscafe]

Another weekend ends, and another dragon emerges…

Custom leather dragon gauntlets

[thegoldencatscafe]

this is so fucking funny

I haven't seen it get mentioned on Tumblr yet but Samsung has just gotten caught in a hilarious scam: they apparently advertised how their latest phones can take great picture of the moon, compared to other phones!

But it turns out they aren't using machine-learning to clear up blurry pictures, they're using machine-learning to detect when you're taking a picture of the moon, and then they swap in a saved PNG file of the moon.

A reddit user figured this out by taking a photo of the moon from Wikipedia, blurring it in photoshop, then trying to photograph it from across the room with all the lights turned out.

Their Samsung phone somehow managed to "clear up" the blurriness and recover details that weren't there in the first place. Because it's just cheating.

[thegoldencatscafe]

I unironically love the character names in the Hunger Games series.

Haymitch, Peeta, Hazelle, Leevy, Maysilee, Finnick and Greasy Sae look bizarre when you first see them written down, but then if you think about how they look and/or sound it's pretty clear that they're meant to be modern names, only modern names that have changed spelling and pronounciation over time— as you would have expected them to have done so over how ever many hundreds of years it's been since our modern day.

(Remember, though The Hunger Games themselves have only been going on for 75 years, the universe they're in is canonically post-apocalyptic— the reason nobody ever mentions what's happening in the rest of the world is that everywhere except America was destroyed in a nuclear war. We're not given much of an indication how long it's been since then.)

Peeta is Peter, Haymitch is Hamish, and Hazelle is Hazel, Maysilee is Maisie— the changes in pronunciation are slight (Peeta and Peter are already virtually identical in my accent), and the spelling has changed to match.

Leevy is either a corruption of Lily, or more likely I suspect 'Livvy', a common nickname for Olivia; Finnick is probably from Finnegan (shorten in to 'Finneg' and then say it over and over very fast); Sae could be short for Sarah, or Sally or even Susan— it's not uncommon for nicknames to become real names in their own right (look at Harry or Molly as examples).

I also love the trend of having District 1 parents give their kids names relating to the luxury items their district produces— Glimmer, Marvel, Gloss, Cashmere, Velvereen (presumably a corruption of 'velveteen'), Facet— because those things are all a) objectively pretty/nice (like naming a kid 'Diamond' or 'Star' today) and presumably status symbols in their district.

Meanwhile District 3 does the same thing, but all the pronunciations are corrupted. You've got technical names to do with the manufacture of electronics— Wiress (wireless), Circ (circuit)— but you've also got what I'm pretty sure are meant to be corruptions of modern brand names— Beetee (BT), Teslee (Tesla).

To me this kind of suggests that District 3 is less conscious of this influence than District 1. Like, parents in 1 are more likely to deliberately think "I'll name my kid Glimmer, because things that glimmer are pretty" whereas 3 as a culture might have genuinely forgotten that those names used to mean something, in the same way that most of us don't think much about how the name 'Arthur' comes from the old word for 'Bear'.

And of course, then you've got the Capitol leaning hard into those ancient Roman vibes with names like Fulvia, Plutarch, Seneca, Tigris… but still using the European/American personal name+family name format, which the Romans didn't really do. Like it's very clear that this is a future society fetishising the classical era, rather than an actual resurgence of Roman culture.

It's just such a cool world-building detail. So many dystopian novels just go for modern names (and there's nothing wrong with that, especially if you're only looking a couple of hundred years into the future) but thinking about how names might have evolved over the centuries and the different naming traditions that might have developed in different areas really adds a whole new dimension to the culture of Panem.

[thegoldencatscafe]

*sighs dreamily* what a fucking weirdo

[thegoldencatscafe]

i just remembered a story my first plug told me. she's butch and gets mistaken for a man a lot. one time she was walking home when a guy pulled a knife on her and asked for everything in her pockets. panicking, she said "ok" and the guy hearing her voice was like "oh shit, are you a girl?" and she was like "yeah" and he put the knife away and said something like "sorry. i can't do this to a woman" and left. feminist ally.

[thegoldencatscafe]

Let's play Rock Paper Scissors!!! It's you up against the option with the most votes. Put in the tags whether you won, lost, or tied, but don't say anything about what you voted or what the current results are.

Ready? Now....

#tied

[thegoldencatscafe]

That took a turn.

[thegoldencatscafe]

[thegoldencatscafe]

[thegoldencatscafe]

the queen is back at it again??

description:

a tweet by @JUNlPER on twitter saying: ''the same person who leaked the no fly list published email communications of conservatives intentional efforts to ramp up their anti-LGBTQ hate. as was incredibly obvious, the moral panic is intentional and planned out''

followed by a screenshot of the hacker website, named maia with the text:

this file ("Deutsch emails") contains the complete source of email threads for the 2023-03-08 Mother Jones story “Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country”. the emails are comprised of communications spanning 2019-2021 principally regarding an attempt to pass a trans youth transition treatment ban in south dakota in 2019, spearheaded by republican rep. fred deutsch and sen. lee schoenbeck.

there are extensive discussions between deutsch and notorious anti-gay and anti-trans “experts” associated with known hate groups targeting transgender healthcare in the united states, including dr. quentin l. van meter and dr. michelle cretella of the catholic medical association, dr. andre van mol of the christian medical & dental associations and american college of pediatricians, dr. michael k. laidlaw of the kelsey coalition, dr. william j. malone of the society for evidence-based gender medicine, dr. paul w. hruz of the national catholic bioethics center, laura haynes of narth, and deacon dr. patrick w. lappert of catholic reparative therapy group courage international. participants discuss crafting their language to avoid acknowledging that transgender people exist, constructing new ways to define doctors as criminals for providing gender-affirming care, and targeting a federal agency publication that correctly points out the dangers of anti-gay conversion therapy. their emails frequently digress into personal vendettas and ambitions of destroying established professional groups such as the endocrine society, and they typically celebrate their anti-trans legal and political achievements as a victory of the christian god.

the emails describe a wider national effort against transition treatment for minors, which included discussions with idaho rep. julianne young and sen. steve vick, georgia rep. ginny earhart, and florida rep. anthony sabatini. several anti-lgbt conservative legal groups are intimately involved in the discussion, including alliance defending freedom, adf-affiliated detransitioners hacsi horvath and walt heyer, eunie smith of eagle forum, adf-linked attorney vernadette r. broyles of the child & parental rights campaign, jane robbins of the american principles project, kara dansky and natasha chart of women’s liberation front, richard mast of liberty counsel, and emily zinos of minnesota family council and hands across the aisle. more recently, the transphobia-captured state of alabama harassed the endocrine society and wpath with subpoenas for their internal communications regarding hate groups and individuals participating in the deutsch emails, including segm, the american college of pediatricians, michael laidlaw, william malone, andre van mol, michelle cretella, and quentin van meter. the release of the deutsch emails is in the public interest and brings an equivalent level of transparency to the internal work of these major anti-trans advocacy and lobbying groups.

CLARIFICATION: i, maia, am not the source of this email leak, merely a publisher, since i feel that this should be more widely available than just to selected journalists''

and finally a link to maia website with the emails

[thegoldencatscafe]

Chatty catty.

[thegoldencatscafe]

always remember gay men are the reason we dont have to pay for public bathrooms in canada

[thegoldencatscafe]

Shaved my head today

[thegoldencatscafe]

im in this picture and i dont like it??

my gender is so weird....like I wish I was born a boy so I could be feminine....girl what