Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@Leucrotta "Hey, Sam'u'll'o'th'ogh."

"Oh. Hey, Ralph."

"How's the Elder game?"

"Same old. How's the PI scene?"

"Meh. Took out one of your minions yesterday, sorry about that."

"It's OK, Ralph."

"Thanks, Sam, you're a peach."

"OK. Have a good one. Watch your corners on the way out. *dodecatuple guns gesture* MY HOUNDS GONNA GETCHA!"

"Haha, I'll be sure and get my wards up, Sam." "Huh. What a decent Ur-guy."

@PennyPennyPenny I mean, nobody has yet been able make a compelling case to me that they're not just two different manifestations of the same cosmic energy to start with

of COURSE lazy and perfect is attracted to lazy and perfect, look at my wife and me-- i haven't been ignited in years

@001zlnv @anthracite Dammit, kobold, you reminded me there is cake. I don't have any cake. Maybe I can get @anthracite to bring me some cake.

@001zlnv @anthracite @tiden@blimps.xyz Nutria.🐯​

i adore my mother but man this is just peak boomer :)

Currently what is keeping my sanity afloat is the discovery that there are collections of MST3K on Youtube that are just all the host segments by season. ::>

e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlrPtf05gP0

+ Crazy Cat Lady: Unknown, presume resolved. Haven't heard a thing.

+ Foot Injury: Looks like it's almost healed!

+ Cable: Back on.

+ Ears: No ache, no itch. Got an ENT follow-up coming.

+ Cats: Seem OK. Haven't seen Shemp or Sugarfoot in a day or so, but it's been rainy. Peebles is very very very definitely here. *loving sigh*

- Wiring issue: some kind of AC backfeed on our cable line, possibly a fire hazard? Have talked to multiple people including a friend with electrician experience and am reassured house isn't going to randomly incinerate or anything.

- Peggy's License: Denied an "F" at Louisana DMV, am kinda furious over it. Sounds like there is a good hope she can qualify for a doctor's note but the information online is really ambiguous.

- Laptop: definitely starting to have issues with the case, no new cracks, case is now loose enough that the trackpad buttons can be triggered by accident *sigh*

Doing rather better today.

Ear is barely acting up today and I have an ENT appointment which should be cheap and low-stress.

No word from Crazy Cat Lady at all so far. Still a tad twitchy there but not like yesterday.

Actually got some work done. And got a full week of vacation for Ida thanks to my angel boss. He even rushed it as an emergency payroll.

Internet still out. Appointment is tomorrow afternoon. Thoughts and prayers. *smirk*

Still got a big ding out of one of my toes. Basically the first layer of skin rubbed off-- probably because of a bandage I'd put on to protect a blister on ANOTHER toe. *sigh*

It looks about the same as yesterday and I probably won't be able to walk much until I see it start healing. Oh, well. Could have been worse, no blood-- just an unnervingly neat disc cut out of the first layer of skin.

Also, I think this whole stupid adventure has instilled me with just enough pettiness that I'm gonna leave myself a reminder for six months from now:

"Subscribe Crazy Cat Lady and Angry Anti-Cat Neighbor's postal addresses to as much gay porn, aluminum siding marketing, and Scientology propaganda as humanly possible."

Nothin'. Not even a text to arrange to pick up her cat food, which kinda surprises me.

I'm really hoping this is the last we hear of her. My last text to her was a Hail Mary attempt to explain to her that looking her address up on a public directory during a crisis SHE involved us in is NOT an "invasion of privacy."

Maybe she did actually realize she'd fucked up and burnt her last bridge. I'm not hopeful, because there are still so many red flags over her and she sure wasn't listening to me at all Monday night.

Still. I went back through our last exchange and she didn't really make any threats or anything, just... berated me for helping her in the wrong way.

Honestly? Given what I did learn about her background-- quite unwillingly, I assure you, over the course of 4-5 rambling 30-minute phone calls-- I kinda wonder if she doesn't have an immigration issue she's afraid of getting exposed.

Dammit, I gotta stop sympathizing with this woman. It's OVER unless she makes it not over. I just hope she's recuperated enough to be able to feed those poor cats, because they're the ones who are most likely to suffer because of this. :(

Artie is a very very long cat. I apologize for not having pictures, but there was just a whole lot of her to pet and I had to use both hands. She would accept nothing less.

God, after all the shit I've taken in the last few weeks, it's good to have a feisty selfish little cat come up and want NOTHING more than my attention. <3 <3 <3

@Aradia God I miss shopping malls being worth a damn. I should share the INCREDIBLY DEPRESSING AND SURREAL pics Peg and I took of my poor hometown mall's fundie-church-and-vape-store infested carcass.

@Leucrotta I guess if I were to play devil's advocate for it one last time... I think the main feeling these posts feed off of is VINDICATION.

I think it's reasonable right now for leftists to crave stories that
prove, after years of shameless gaslighting, that reality is catching up with the Trumpies. And if the story involves our abusers and their enablers suffering from that proof, it's going to REALLY fill that need.

And it's hard to blame them for it, because it's been traumatic as fuck watching these people run roughshod over us and bullshit us straight to our faces.

You've still got me wondering all over again if it's something we can trust. I'm still going to try to quash the habit of joining in, because you're still damn right that this could turn into something VERY ugly. And that something feels fakey and too-easy about how social media is encouraging it.

I just feel like there's more than mere smugness at work here. It's not just "we were better and smarter than you," it's "the things we were pretty sure were lies, and you got mad at us for questioning, turned out to be true and maybe we also won't have to put up with as much of your shit now."

I think I can at least see why these feel like a punch-up instead of a punch-down to a lot of leftists right now. And the further down they punch, yeah, the less sympathy I have.

My stepsister, for example, is a dipshit but she's not a Redcap-- she just read some Facebook posts and is also quite dim. *sigh* But she doesn't deserve to die for that, and I'd be mad if someone slid into her memorials to make fun of her.

She walked into this of her own free will, but she hasn't forced it on anyone, she hasn't preached it at anyone, and she hasn't made any money off of it. Her sin is no greater than, say, believing newspaper astrology is objectively real, or believing in the Loch Ness Monster.

But when it happens to be the same sort of person who's been gaslighting us about everything ELSE for the last 6+ years, whether as a politician or a voter... and it turns out their latest line of cargo cult bullshit, that they ridiculed us for disbelieving, KILLED them?

It's gonna be really hard not to smile. And I am probably gonna still do it on the inside. :>

@Leucrotta Oof, yeah, OK, I have NO TROUBLE AT ALL agreeing with you that it can feel very bandwagony and "Two-Minutes-Hate"-y. It does have the potential to spawn into something far, far worse if we let it become a habit.

I think you've convinced me to at least *try* not to feed those kinds of posts. No guarantees-- I'm not sure I'm even gonna have basic emotional reins again for the rest of 2021 at this rate. But you have a REALLY good point and thank you for hammering it home for me.

@LexYeen No energy for details but I thought I'd weigh and mention that I transcribed a series of USMC and US Army oral history tapes from Iraq and Afghanistan... and I was impressed by what a bunch of assholes the middle-brass WEREN'T.

They actually kinda won me over. They reminded me of the troops from Catch-22, kinda drably aware that they've been sent to a clusterfuck and just too tired and busy to be mad about it.

They weren't exactly woke, but there was some VERY frank speech in those tapes, and the closest they came to racism was being uniformly unimpressed with local military discipline and job pride. And they even seemed aware that some of this was because THE LOCALS WEREN'T ABOUT TO GO OUT OF THEIR WAY FOR INVADERS. They were mostly just griping about, say, "Why the FUCK can't our local water guy ever show up on time?!?"

They were very up-front and forward, at least on mike, about the fact that there was CATEGORICALLY NO TIME for bullshit like abusing the locals, because they absolutely would not get by without earning their trust.

How all this played out in reality... well... *sigh* But I went in with very low expectations and ended up kinda liking some of these majors and captains.

@Leucrotta I felt that way for a very long time but after a certain point of ingratitude, gaslighting, and open hostility I just... stopped feeling obliged to keep empathizing with people who have rejected EVERY overture to not be my enemy.

I can still muster sympathy for people who just quietly *don't want* the vaccine. Quite a bit, actually. There's a woman I follow on Youtube whose channel is very woo-heavy and it's attracted a lot of new agey vaccine skeptics.

Them, I'm generally pretty nice to. In their presence, I try to be the Reasonable Friend Who Shared Their Fears And Is Just Fine, See? I tell them-- truthfully-- that I was very worried about the vaccine interacting with my host of weird autoimmune issues. And that it's not unreasonable at all to be afraid of having something foreign and scary put into your body. I really hope I've at least reached one of them.

But as for, say, hard-core Trumpies who wear "fuck your feelings" masks on airplanes and abuse the staff... it's gotten real hard not to see what's happening to them as Sherman's Second March To The Sea, except that a virus is doing all the fighting for us. It feels like these people really would have made us make war on them, and this just hits them hard while letting us keep our hands clean, so to speak. There's something so *civilized* about a war that anybody can escape by just LISTENING TO THEIR FUCKING DOCTOR.

So yeah. I'll cheer for COVID to take pastors and senators and such who SPREAD this nonsense. And I'll cheer for it to take the sort of people who would have just spent the rest of their lives on trying to take away, say, Peg's freedom to be Peg. I didn't want it to be that way, but I am done trying to stop them from performing the admittedly incredibly convenient act of dying.

But still. All it takes to get my empathy and humanity back is showing me a shred of it to start with. All these people have to do is approach the topic with calm, polite concern instead of being smug assholes. It's actually happened, and I do still engage them with sympathy, if a bit less than I had last year.

I wouldn't even feel this cruel about the worst of the Trumpies going from "muh freedom" to "muh ventilator" if I didn't already feel that ALL reasonable attempts to communicate with them had not only been ignored, but got their active hostility.

So yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to stop cheering when I see someone die who's been actively hostile to our concerns for them. Them dying now is starting to seem like our last, best hope of being able to take the country back from them, and... you have seen how fucking hard I tried to make nice to the Republicans once upon a time.

I still think you are very noble to want to avoid that feeling yourself, though. *hug* You're NEVER wrong to say people should get whatever empathy we have left for them, even if they've done wrong, in that GLIMMER of a hope we can win someone back over.

It's still a damn shame we couldn't save them. I just can't pretend not to be a little relieved when reality weighs in our side YET AGAIN after someone willfully, angrily, defiantly walks straight into this and dies.

So in case anyone was wondering where I've been post-Ida...

@anthracite and I got into a dispute with the Crazy Cat Lady we were trying to help. She is now convinced I am stalking her on the dark web. I'm 80% sure that in our final phone call she mentioned dating Harry Connick Jr.

What actually happened is that she sent a text to us during Ida that said she was without power and low on phone and to contact... the other people who had been feeding her cats, who proved later to BARELY KNOW HER EITHER.

They didn't answer so we Googled her first name and phone number and found the front desk of her nursing home, who we asked to go check on her. Apparently that was an "invasion of her privacy" even though SHE asked US for help and never told us not to contact anyone else.

And now she's gotten it in her head that I used some "secret Internet site" to find her information-- uh, it was the first result on Google, darlin'. And I am now a "force of chaos" in her life.

Just yesterday morning, she'd told Peg we were "angels." That's how fast she turned.

But then our neighbor-- who she's been sparring with over these cats for 8 years, and she ASSURED us would mind his own business-- spots us going to feed the cats and starts harassing us. And we call her to tell her we just can't fucking do this anymore. She ARGUES. She PLEADS.

And then the moment I mention that I went over to that guy's house later and attempted to apologize, suddenly I have done something terribly wrong and she's told me not to go over to that house or feed the cats again, and I'm some kind of hacker violating her privacy.

So yeah.

I am emphatically not okay today. This is all on top of a bunch of other post-Ida crisis. Crazy Cat Lady told us herself that she once threatened to shoot that neighbor's kneecaps off. (I am somewhat assured by the fact he still has kneecaps after 8 years of her shit.)

We blocked her texts last night. And I know how narcissists are. I'm really afraid that she's going to come try to force the issue. I'm worried she might try to take it out on OUR cats. People reassure me she'll probably forget about us now that we've stopped rewarding her...

And they're probably absolutely right. This is a feeble old woman who seems to have burned every bridge in her life. (I'm not even BEGINNING to detail all the sketchy contradictory stuff in her stories.) But I am already traumatized and having even that vague worry that she MIGHT be deluded and vindictive enough to try something with us won't leave my mind.

I am in really bad shape, folks. I think I'm at the point where I don't feel guilt or shame in saying I have some genuine trauma happening here.

I didn't even fucking like Norm MacDonald in the slightest and I am too fucking traumatized to pretend that I was not kind of a bit chuffed to see that he's trending because he's dead. I was honestly expecting they were just quoting obnoxious he'd said about the culture wars. I can't really look beyond my own emotional needs right now, and I'd take the dead Norm over the live annoying smug one.

@JulieSqveakaroo Honestly... it's just the lack of clear resolution on any of this. Plus all the anger over trying our best to help this lady and getting burned YET AGAIN.

What I really need is some reassurance that she's never going to try to start any shit with us, and... that's going to be difficult since she's apparently going to resume feeding the cats, which will bring her to our block AND NEAR OUR OWN CATS on a daily basis.

I'm scared. This woman has a long history of making threats against people, one of the first big red flags I should have seen coming. But the other big red flag was that she would NOT TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER and would start browbeating and making excuses every time we tried to duck out.

And there's a point where I KNEW this was all gonna end this way, just because we said "oh sure, why not" to a request to feed some cats.

It's just too huge of an anxiety trigger to leave open indefinitely. I might not be okay until MONTHS have passed without hearing from this woman.

Apparently she also has a son on the police force, which is worrisome, though I strongly suspect he is NOT on the Mid-City NOLA police force...