Hot Take: Rocks Are Cool.

24 - f - grad student

[zibaldoni-elzapoppin]

September

[the-shy-fox]

[altsoph]

Starkey Comics published an excellent selection of false cognates (words from different languages with similar spelling and meaning, but with a completely different etymology)

[possessivesuffix]

(From the same author as the Etymological Tree of H₃reǵ- seen earlier this year.)

[bisexual-bifurcations]

Why hot

[pelahnar]

sun

[lemonskittlesofficial]

why do photos of empty hospitals scare me so much……… wild

[silvahhauntah]

OMG I ACTUALLY HAVE AN ANSWER!!! Psychology student part of tumblr, here! There’s a phenomenon in the brain, although I can’t remember the world, where your brain doesn’t understand emptiness in a space you’ve becomes used to seeing people in, and, your survival brain, trying to make up for it, makes you see or feel things that aren’t there, this is common with empty stores that are usually bustling, train stations, abandoned buildings, etc. The reason you become unsettled or scared is because the part of your brain responsible for survival is like: “wait. Everyone’s gone. Does this mean danger? Should I leave, too?” It’s a survival thing, apparently!

[solarpunksoftie]

Being in school after hours invokes a sense of constant threat and unstoppable conquest at the same time

[aiweirdness]

Once again, a neural net tries to name cats

Last year I trained a neural net to generate new names for kittens, by giving it a list of over 8,000 existing cat names to imitate. Starting from scratch, with zero knowledge of English or any context for the words and letter combinations it was trying out, it tried to predict what letters might be found in cat names, and in which order. Its names ranged from the strange to the completely nonsensical to the highly unfortunate (Retchion, Hurler, and Trickles were some of its suggestions). Without knowledge of English beyond its list of cat names, it didn’t know what letter combinations to avoid.

So I decided to revisit the cat-naming problem, this time using a neural net that had a lot more context. GPT-2, trained by OpenAI on a huge chunk of the internet, knows which words and letter combinations tend to be used together on the English-language internet. It also has (mostly) figured out which words and letter combinations to avoid, at least in some contexts (though it does tend to suddenly switch contexts, and then, yikes).

When I trained GPT-2 on the list of cat names using Max Woolf’s colab notebook, it still retained a lot of what it had learned from the rest of the internet. Gone were the strange names like “Tilly-Mapper” and “Balllucidoux” - it had a bunch of real words it could use instead. Here are some of the names it came up with - and the Morris Animal Refuge (who you may remember from that time they used neural net names for their guinea pigs) has given some of these names to some highly adoptable kittens.

First, neural net can do fancy:

Taffeta Pompompur Monocle Tom Glitter Notion Tinnitus Cheesemonger M. Tinklesby Linklater Soap

It can also do the opposite of fancy:

Scat Cat Butthole Gangrene Moisture Grotesque Petard Oilbag Buttwig The Cream Meatbag Dr Fart Fudge Putty Scumbag Constipation BUTT

And it can also do names ranging from tough to downright sinister:

Miss Vulgar Lillith The Vamp Elle Fury Deadbolt Romeo of Darkness Starmaker Fist Warning Signs Bibles Smoked The Firestarter Higher Rune Scarlet Be Thy Coat Kill All Humans Bones Of The Master Mr. Sinister Evil Whispers Spawn Serendipitous Kill Stranglehold

(Starmaker and Sparky Buttons are from a litter that had upper respiratory infections that damaged their eyes, but even though their world is kinda cloudy, they love to play and cuddle.)

I’m a particular fan of the Very Weird cat names:

Honeystring Dr Leg Tom Noodle Pinball Scene Peanutbutterjiggles You’re Telling A Lie Beep Boop Thoughts Bobble Bun Atmosphere You Name It Whiskeridoo Sparky Buttons

Seemingly This Guy Various Authors Chicken Whiskey Fish Especially Thelonious Monsieur Ringo Shuffles Sweet Cakes EXTAs (Eye Stalks) Checker Spin Donut Quin Two Patz Grandpa He Glad Funky Moe Fluttering Feelers Accepted A Tribute Chewie Bean PLEASE Gregory Chimney Notable PRODUCT LEGEND Weird Science Platinum Not Suitable For Character the Enforcer

Did I mention these cats are adoptable? If you live near Philadelphia, you live near these kitties!

Bonus content: yet more cat names!

[jkatnayc]

The thing abouth all these Disney remakes is that most of them, it feels like if someone once said, “I’m going to make a live action remake of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and then he just took a photo of some random bald guy screaming on a bridge. I mean all the elements are there but he changes all the expressionist elements in favor of “realism” loosing most of the things that made the scream one of the most important, if not the most important pieces of the Norwegian expressionism, maybe just keeping the general comossition and maybe making some little changes, just enough to make it feel kind of different, but not enough to be relevant. Change the long sleeves for shorter ones, or maybe even add a new character in the back who will be there, but, at the end of the won’t be really important. But loosing the colors, the shapes, the brush strokes, the style.

IT’s just a bland looking photo of a guy screaming, that is only really relevant mostly because of the audience being already familiar with the original artwork.

[jackiespeakz]

ACCURATE

[meckamecha]

Also it’s worth noting that it’s impossible for photography to capture The Scream, not only because of the style, but because of the sky.

The inspiration was the horror at seeing the effects of Krakatoa from halfway across the world, with no understanding of why the sky had changed colors.

[toastpotent-deactivated20250619]

if you ever feel stupid remember that kodak used to hold almost 90% of all camera sales in the US but fell off the face of the earth because in 1975 they created the first self-contained digital camera which would have been market-breaking but decided to trash the project because they figured that digital photography was a phase that people would grow out of, only to go out of business because they were the only company that wouldn’t commericalize on digital cameras

[toastpotent-deactivated20250619]

@iamoutofideas “capitalism promotes innovation!”

[thetyrannosaur]

Kinda similar to how 3D printing is 40 year old technology, but the reason it’s big now is because the patent finally expired

[toastpotent-deactivated20250619]

yes sir! see also: wireless charging

[theroguefeminist]

But capitalism promotes innovation and technological advancement amirite?

[twitblr]

Word.

[cloudfreed]

The Texan Revolution formed from the anger of these white settlers in Texas, which was still part of Mexico at this time. They had moved from slave-owning southern part of the US and they became upset because the president of Mexico, Vicente Guerrero, abolished slavery. Mexico actually attempted to restrict American immigration into Mexico-owned Texas! The leaders of the Mexican centralist forces that defeated the Texan revolutionary forces at the Alamo were against slavery. If you ever hear a Texan say “Remember the Alamo!” just remember that the Texan settlers that died there had a vested interest in maintaining control of Texas territory so they could continue to use slave labor. 

[thewordywarlock]

forget the alamo.

[logans-girl2001]

I’ve lived in Texas my whole life and am extremely proud of my Texas heritage. We are required to take a year of Texas history in school. When we learned about the Alamo, they NEVER told us about any of this.

[shitty-feefees-deactivated20190]

Yeah, the south has a history of erasing history from their textbooks, there was a big push in the 50′s to revise their history books and distort things so that they push the south in a heroic light.

[lewd-plants]

Mother fucker

[odinsblog]

Texas has a very long history of whitewashing history

[meckamecha]

Texas also has the largest single market for textbooks due to having state-level curriculum, and therefore is able to dictate the majority of educational texts produced in the US. Kinda like how California dictates the majority of car emissions standards, except shitty

[la-laborista-republiko]

Y'know what I really fuckin hate?

Tiny houses.

Not the concept, the notion, the Platonic ideal of a low-cost low-impact high-efficiency dwelling. That’s great. That’s awesome.

What really imagines my dragons is that in practice about 9 times out of 10 tiny house communities are just a way for rich hipsters to finally fulfil their greatest fantasy:

They found a way to fucking gentrify the trailer park

[poiplefunguy]

listen i know you’re making a point here but i cant stop thinking about ‘imagines my dragons’

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[hydro-homies]

I regret to inform you

[tessie-the-bee]

“Today was gonna be a bad one, can’t get over my hair”

[pelahnar]

I like “you have to call the school and tell them I’ve got polio”

[twinberry]

My hip new communications theory is actually that millennial/gen z/internet native humor is so weird and abstract because of the sheer amount of words we’re exposed to daily. we’ve heard a lot of words in a lot of different orders so if you wanna get a reaction out of us you usually gotta put words in an order we haven’t seen before

[twinberry]

So like normally structured jokes aren’t as funny anymore but “lemon lime spine” is a one-hit K.O.

[rockshitty]

you know i wanna disagree with you on principle, because it can’t be that simple, but “lemon lime spine” just made me crack up for the first time all day.

[averagefairy]

did humans invent math or did we discover it

does math even exist

[averagefairy]

i already regret making this post bc smart people keep messaging me trying to explain math and it’s making me nauseous 

[cappucino-commie]

The universe did some weird shit, and humans were like “Got you now motherfucker! We got numbers and shit to figure it all out!”. And as punishment for this hubris God fucked up physics so hard we still don’t know what’s going on.

[tropiyas]

some fucker decided they could just start counting things and it was all downhill from there

[angelicguy]

i have such a bad diet my cells have unionized and refuse to work unless i eat an orange

[cats2019forthenintendoswitch]

I think that’s called scurvy

[teaboot]

Every person in a position of political power should have their daily needs matched to the lowest class of their country.

[teaboot]

You make $6 an hour now, Mr. Congressman, and you’re not allowed to sit down or take breaks during your 7.5 hour daily shift. If you don’t like that, then you’re welcome to make some changes

[betthearm]

This.

[norcross]

i’ve never understood being able to enact laws that will never impact you

[inthisquarter]

Piling on a couch together with a bunch of queer nerds in undergrad to self-reflect on our assorted identities was awesome and interesting at the time AND is helping me be a good friend now.

A friend of mine here has gone on a couple of dates with another friend of ours recently and has been telling me generally positive things about it. However, yesterday, she looked really concerned and asked if she could talk to me about something important. Turns out, she felt weird about some things and was wondering if she might be asexual. She didn’t know who to talk to, what to Google, or how to self-analyze about it.

Now, 24 hours later, she has...

...been told that it’s okay and normal to feel what she’s feeling.

...gone through some self-reflection questions that I came up with based on the discussions of my couch-pile of queer friends.

...the option to chat with her new Ace Mom (a.k.a. my old couch-pile’s resident asexual that has a drive to mom-friend).

...read a bunch of info on asexuality.org, as recommended by her new Ace Mom.

...three novels about asexual characters by queer authors, after a walk to our local bookstore.

...the calendar for our school’s diversity center events, in case she wants to discuss with local folks with similar identities.

...more optimism!

So, since several of my queer nerd friends are on this web site, thanks for letting me in the couch-pile with you; I was ready to be there for her because of you. :)

[exigencelost]

Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:

1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.

2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.

3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.

4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.

[hugintheraven]

5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.