The voices in my head.

I think my favorite translation-related detail in the Witcher saga that separates the original Polish version from English lies in Geralt’s horse(s), Roach

He names all of his horses “Roach,” which in English, is a very grim-sounding name. It immediately stirs the thought of a cockroach, and it sort of fits the grimy dark fantasy aesthetic that the series has going for it, as well as Geralt’s personality as someone who likes to keep things simple and uncomplicated. He gives the name to every horse he owns, further adding to that.

Meanwhile, in the original Polish version, his horse’s name is Płotka, which to my understanding is a diminutive form of płoć, which is a type of fish, known as a common roach in English, which is actually a pretty small and common fish. It being a diminutive form, it’s also basically saying “Roachie” instead of “Roach,” so all things considered, it’s meant to be a tiny, adorable, cutesy name, but that gets completely lost in the translation. It’s like naming your horse “Guppy” or something.

op i need you to know when you google “ Płotka“ this is like the third image 

Toss a coin to your fisher, o valley of plenty.

I also want to add that a roach is a type of fish. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_roach

If you’re UK based and love knitting/yarn/rare heritage breeds, there’s a London City Farms Kickstarter out there right run by a sustainable textiles creator now that have pooled together something like 16 rare breeds across the city farms and turned it into a machine and hand knitting yarn. Most of these fleeces were going to waste because, as we all know, fleeces are priced so lowly that it’s usually not worth the cost of the cleaning, processing and industrial spinning. You can buy a skein, cone, or an item made solely from the natural colours that the blended sheep breeds produce.

From the Loch Ness Monster afficionados who have funded making Loch Ness the most studied body of water ever to the tremendous strides in dinosaur understanding made possible by Jurassic Park's desire to have the bestest most accurate dinosaurs ever to whatever the fuck is going on with the "dire" wolves here, the amount of good science funded by comparatively-frivolous priorities is really fucking impressive.

No, they don't always get it right, and sometimes that annoys. But also, they fund miracles, and that IMHO makes up for a multitude of sins.

one of the more bleak things to acknowledge is that if you pirate literally all of your music and then set aside a spotify subscription's worth of money each month to spend on a single pay-what-you-want album, it would almost immediately amount to you supporting those musicians more than streaming does

pirating all of your music and then buying a hat or something four times a year still makes you pull significantly ahead of the person who streams thousands of songs every year. it's not really a fair or good system for anyone

What a good post to reblog on bandcamp friday. Remember that any money you spend on albums on bandcamp today goes 100% to the artist.

I saw a lot of people reblogging this with my addition two days ago and now I'm afraid some of them might have thought it was bandcamp friday that day lol. So for anyone with post timestamps turned off: I made that addition on Friday March 7th 2025. Bandcamp fridays always fall on the first friday of the month (when they do them) so the next one should fall on April 4th

The next Bandcamp Friday is on May 2nd, 2025! You can use this page to check how long until the next one :3

The remaining ones this year are:

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

If the text says the curtains are blue you can argue about what that means; but if you’re going to claim they’re actually yellow you’d better have a really good argument.

Questions to ask about this screenshot of a social media post:

When is it from? Is the news it purports to report current, or did this happen years ago?

Is there actual reporting on this? The image doesn't include any sort of source - where is this claim coming from?

Did this really happen? Sometimes people on the internet lie.

Even if it did happen, is the highly emotional language used here an accurate representation of the event?

In this case, the answers turned up by a thirty second internet search are:

March 4, 2025

First reported in Wired, since covered by a range of other reputable publications,

Maybe, and sort of. A pro-trump pac was charging one million per seat for a dinner at Mar a lago at which he was a featured speaker. Wired had a number of sources for this. They had one anonymous source for the five million dollar private meeting thing. They are a fairly trustworthy news source, so this is probably reliable

It's always good to be suspicious of anything that provides a strong emotional reaction, particularly a negative one. In this case, the basic information seems true, but the post implies that this money is going directly to trump, which may not be the case. While people are paying money to a pro-trump organization, it is unclear where this money is going

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

I'm sorry, I know you weren't actually looking for an explanation but I always have a rant about this locked and loaded.

As far as I can tell the reasons that this happens are:

Anyway, in conclusion: it sucks, I'm sorry.

The fun flipside of this is that I've seen people who are more right wing become aggressively pro regulation and pro accommodation when they or their family members have to suddenly take on the individual burden of making up for a society that doesn't include them by default.

US specific:

Is your ham made with vinegar? Does your ham have the generic word "spices" on the ingredient list? Does your ham include "smoke flavoring"? Does your ham include caramel coloring?

Because malt vinegar has gluten in it. "Spices" may include wheat products in a mix. Smoke flavoring may be made with barley flour. Caramel coloring may be made with wheat or barley syrup.

If the label says "gluten free" that means that the "spices," caramel coloring, vinegar, and smoke flavor are certified to contain 20ppm or less of gluten.

If the ham is cured in any way, it may include gluten. If the ham was marinated, it probably includes gluten. If the ham was prepared in a facility that processes wheat in any way, it might be cross contaminated with gluten.

There's a company out there called "Gluten Free Water" that makes water in plastic bottles, poking fun at the idea that too many things have a gluten free label. I fucking hate that company. Because that company is functionally saying "lol, people are so sensitive and over the top about this, let's be a little silly and laugh about how crazy people can be with their 'gluten free' nonsense."

Did you know that there are sustainable food containers and straws that contain wheat? And that you don't have to label them? There are definitely people with celiac who have been sickened by biodegradable plastic straws in their "obviously water is gluten free there's no risk here" water.

"It's over-labeled so it looks trendy" just means you don't know how foods are made or what foods contain gluten. Gluten is ridiculously common in foods in general, and also in packaged meats.

Your ham has to say gluten free because it distinguishes it from the hams that do contain gluten, which is a fucking lot of them. And you're annoyed that your ham has to say gluten free and I'm annoyed that I'm standing in the grocery store calling a ham company to figure out where they source their caramel coloring so I can figure out if the damned ham is safe to eat.

"lol, oats don't have wheat in them, are people so stupid that they have to be told what is and isn't wheat? why does this oatmeal have a gluten free label?" Cross contamination; gluten free oats are not grown near wheat and are not processed in facilities that process wheat.

"lol, rice doesn't have wheat in it, why is this rice labeled gluten free, all rice is gluten free" Cross contamination; the rice isn't processed on equipment that processes wheat.

"lol why does this turkey breast say gluten free, it's just fucking turkey" read the ingredients on your "just" turkey, lots of packaged meat is packed in broth, some of which contains modified food starch, which may contain wheat.

"lol why are these strawberries labeled gluten free? they're fucking strawberries" WAX, BUDDY. SOME FRUITS ARE COATED IN PRESERVATIVE WAX FILMS BY THE MANUFACTURER AND SOME OF THOSE FUCKING FILMS CONTAIN GLUTEN.

I think that part of the reason that people are so irritated by g-free labels is because it exposes them to just how vast and alienating their food systems are.

"Ham should just be meat from a pig, maybe with sugar and salt; what on earth is happening that there might be wheat in that process? Nothing in that process should involve wheat." And then you might have to think about it for a second, might have to wonder what "sugar" and "salt" mean when someone is producing a million hams to be delivered thousands of miles away. It's not just sugar and salt; it's preservatives and nitrates and batch cooking and getting corn syrup instead of sugar and getting smoke flavoring instead of smoking the ham and turning your "whole food" into all the ingredients that make up the ingredients that make up the ingredients.

A "gluten free" label says "you can eat this" to somebody with celiac disease, who has already pounded their skull against the shittiness of the medical system and the food system.

But to someone who doesn't have to worry that their food is going to disable them, a "gluten free" sticker on ham takes a known quantity and turns their sandwich into a hyperobject that contains animal agriculture and industrial additive production and shipping pollution and the ongoing assault on regulation.

If it doesn't have the label, you can just eat your lunch. If it does have the label, you are haunted by the specter of RFK junior imploding the FDA.

Turns out that everyone in the US with celiac is already constantly haunted by the possible implosion of the FDA because food regulation is an up-close and personal part of our daily lives that most people would rather not think about.

Okay, nerd alert. This is a more detailed thread about Klára Peslarová´s gear for iihf wwc 2025. Because it´s fire, it´s cool, and the longer I was looking at it, the more details I found. So, without further ado: The main motive is a lion and two eagles. They, of course, come from the Coat of arms of the Czech Republic.

The double tailed lion symbolises Bohemia (west part of the Czech republic, taking approx 2/4 of the country). The gold-crowned, white-red-checkered eagle symbolises Moravia (south east part of CZ) and the black eagle with silver crescent with a cross in the middle on its chest symbolises Silesia (north east part of CZ). Now the color scheme. Why only blue and white? Why no red? Well it might be a reference to a traditional textile print called Modrotisk.

Modrotisk (blue + print) was often used in czech traditional clothes:

Now the gear. All three forementioned symbols can be found on the pads:

Moravian eagle is on the glove:

And Silesian eagle is on the blocker:

Now the mask. The mask that may be the best mask that ever masked. You´ll see. Again the coat of arms - on one side, there is double tailed lion. on the other side there is an eagle - half Moravian, half Salesian.

But there is more. The national tree of the Czech republic is Tilia cordata. A linden with heart-shaped leaves.

The design of those leaves were inspired by Czech presidential flag.

Pravda vítězí - The truth prevails

In the front of the mask, there is a symbol of a charity set up by a Czech goalie Šimon Hrubec called Saves help,

More detailes - horseshoes and a rose. Horseshoes are a symbol of good luck and that rose is a symbol of the city of Ostrava, Klára´s hometown.

Now the inscription. "Jsme Češi! Nikdy se nevzdáme, slyšíte? Nikdy!" This line refers to a possibly most heroic deed in the czech history - the assassination of a high-ranking NAZI officer Reinhard Heydrich. Czech&Slovak paratroopers, who carried out the assassination, were found after three weeks of hiding, and surrounded by 800 NAZI soldiers in a church crypt. Seven against eight hundred.

Their last words?

"We are Czechs. We are never gonna give up, you hear? Never!"

Sources: Czech national team facebook, wikipaedia and to some extent, myself

first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line

second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all

third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below

fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?

fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves

sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it

seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him

eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night

ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him

tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk

eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important

twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go

thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme

fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader

fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that

sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why

Chillicothe Independent, Volume 6, Number 4, 29 October 1881

There was a serious diphtheria, also referred to as Membranous Croup, outbreak in the area October 1881, with several deaths mentioned in the paper each week. I doubt this worked, but it's hard to blame people for grasping for solutions

i think it’s really funny when fandom people make fun of nonfandom people for not recognizing a fandom url. shit like “jackstanifold” or “strifesuccubus” or “hobocop” are not immediately recognizable as fandom references dude

“how did you not immediately recognize tumblr user ‘bigbluesoup’ as a fandom reference 😂” girl how was i expected to.

anyways put in the tags if you have a fandom url and how recognizable you think it is

ugh I am SO MAD about a SPECIFIC MATH THING and nobody I know likes or knows math enough to empathize with me rather than just going >___> at math in general. Outrageous.

Maybe this is a 'being mad at the use of the internet in education and the simplification of curricula' thing, actually. Not sure. Could be both.

Just. Just I am trying to teach calculus here, and I am aware that 'calculus' is a scary word. I am aware that in common parlance it's synonymous with crazy-advanced mathematical reasoning. I know it's scary, okay. I know. I promise it's not that bad. This student doesn't even think it's that bad. The problem is not the calculus.

The problem is that calculus needs so much algebra. And it needs that algebra to be fluid to the point of almost being incidental. You need to be able to do that algebra backwards and forwards, entirely with variables instead of numbers, which you were maybe never taught in the first place and certainly don't remember if you were because you first took Algebra 1 in the fall of 2020 and if you said you'd learned a single thing about math that year you'd be lying.

And so I am trying to teach calculus but what that actually means is that I'm trying to remind students how to do factoring and distribution from vague memories. I am trying to teach logarithms and exponent rules basically from scratch. I am trying to teach fractions. God help me, I am trying to teach fractions.

And sometimes this means reaching into the wilds of the internet and trying to find drills and practice problems for concepts nobody ever bothers trying to teach in calculus because you learned that in seventh grade, right? Except every single human or AI on the entire goddamn internet seems to believe that the only thing you ever need to do with negative exponents is get rid of them. WHICH! IS NOT! TRUE! FOR CALCULUS!!! THAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF THE THING YOU NEED TO DO FOR CALCULUS!

But hey, why bother to make exponent drills for calculus students, right? After all, if you can turn negative exponents into fractions, you probably know how to do it the other way around just as easily and would never need to practice, and if you're at the calculus level you must've learned that years ago. The same way you learned to solve for 'x' by adding or multiplying things to both sides in middle school, the same way you learn to add fractions with a common denominator when you're eight. Because every single high school math student one hundred percent knows how to add improper fractions by giving them a common denominator, right?

And I am just so mad and frustrated, always, about the ways we do and don't re-teach base principles for math all the way up, because if you didn't get it the first time then fuck you I guess. But somehow like everything else in the world the enshittification of the internet has made this worse, because like. It's not like nobody has ever needed to teach this before. It's not like practice problems for this don't exist. They're just unfindable in a sea of the same seventh-grade worksheets and identical Libretext links that all try to teach the same skill in the same way that just so happens to be the opposite of what I need. Why can no search engine's helpful AI bring me what I'm actually asking for rather than what it thinks I probably want? Why can I not just flip to a page at the end of a chapter of a textbook and find fifty practice problems going backwards and forwards. Why is everything DeltaMath and Khan Academy and locked behind a subscription. Why do half of my high school students not even have textbooks any more. Why do I feel like a crotchety fucking 70-year-old.

Anyway if I see "rewrite without negative exponents" one more time I am going to turn into a wolf and rip something apart with my teeth.