Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@balinares "In this world, Olivia and Snowshoe, you must be oh so smart, or oh so mew. Well, for years I was smart... I recommend mew, and you may quote me." (with apologies to Jimmy Stewart and his invisible rabbit friend)

me while i scritch napping kittens:

"Yes, you're such good kitties! You are such good kitties!"

"..."

"OK, listen, despite anything you may have heard me say in the past, you ARE still good kitties."

"..."

"I mean, we live in a complicated world, and who's really to say who's good or bad."

"..."

"OK, let me level with you. You're kind of terrible but you're *cats*. And if there's one thing you're going to want to know during the course of your life, it's that that's good enough."

@anthracite It always makes me so happy to see the two of them getting along together. 😻​ If we ever do have to find them another home, they are DEFINITELY going together...

@frameacloud Oof. That's a far better point than my knee-jerk snark, yeah. I don't think fatherhood or marriage is *bad* either -- they're just such non-accomplishments, not really anything to be *proud* of simply for doing them... I put using them as pride signifiers in the same category as being really "proud" you're a fan of a given football team. You didn't really *achieve* anything, it's just showing off a membership badge -- in this case, one with some unpleasant partisan/ideological connotations.

Huh. Well, there goes a big ol' geyser of sad gender longings and self-hate.

Honestly, I'm fine, I'm just impressed it managed to crack the multiple calcified layers of job, cat, money, plague, cat, uspol, existential, and cat anxiety above it.

I don't think I've really "felt" gender one way or the other for like the last three months. Which I guess is actually kinda la dolce vita as failed transpeople go.

Does this mean I at least succeeded at being an enby, by setting up a life were 98% of my friends don't give the faintest shit WHAT I am and have zero gender expectations of me?

Yanno, I know you all well enough that I'm gonna just answer "yes" and take some victory where I found it.

@frameacloud "So let's start with the main fact about you, as you yourself have presented it: the two most important things you have ever done are [a] 'participate passively in a religious ritual then eat some cake' [b] sire a human child in a time of profound overpopulation. Thank you for the warning that you have not a damn thing going on in your intellectual, professional, or creative life worth mentioning in a bio."

It's always nice having the sort of interaction with a beleaguered IT pro, with zero innate motive to suck up to you, that ends in them telling you "thanks, you rock!"

(I apparently saved them a lot of time and effort by correctly divining that the weird login notifications I was getting were just them, reimagining my old laptop.)

@PennyPennyPenny i missed you (all) but this has​become traumatizingly reminiscent of how i behave in the face of my real, analog-type cats' demands 🙀🙀🙀🙀🙀

huh. on a related note, i wonder how much it would cost for one of those arcade crane machines

you can still breathe inside of those, right? plenty of air circulation?

and by you i mean kittens?

aaaaaaaaaaaaugh they've learned how to casually leap over the cardboard barrier we built to keep them out of the hallway

see, strat gamers, this is what happens when you don't upgrade your defensive walls and keep an eye on your opponents' tech trees

also, more seriously, i'm afraid that all this constantly picking them up and frantically scooping them back into the kittenarium is bad for their dispositions, can't exactly be great for our friendship that i am becoming the GIANT PAW OF OPPRESSION.

@spacewastrel@yiff.life Good luck, Scamp!

@Phorm The worst part is how well it works as a metaphor for everything ELSE, isn't it. *hugs tight*

Don't worry, darlin', humans CAN be trained, they just take a little longer than the rest of us...

Today's panic: poor Arty started hwarfing just before Peg gave her a handful of treats.

We were afraid for a split second that she was choking! But we're pretty sure she started BEFORE she ate anything, and she immediately wandered off looking reasonably happy -- and, you know, breathing, which we felines are very fond of -- so it was probably just a hairball.

I still half-panicked myself at the cafe by reading up on hairball complications, so I ended up rushing home to see if I could get Artie to eat!

TL;DR, she wolfed down a bunch of kibble and accepted much scritch, and seems just fine. ^___^ Her paw seems 100% healed, too!

Snowshoe on the left, Olivia on the right. They are the best bad kitties.

@Phorm @anthracite you're probably fine hun, i thought it was pretty funny myself but it probably would've been less funny two weekends ago :> that expression in the last frame *is* priceless though

@Phorm @anthracite NO NO NO NO NO

ok except maybe artie if we give her a couple weeks martial arts training and some little kitty-sized crash pads

that's probably her idea of fun

attn @mawr

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingDerps/comments/jyu0ne/my_money_was_on_no5/

@JulieSqveakaroo My messed-up eventual-Texan ex-girlfriend dabbled with that crowd. Funny-scary stuff. Take comfort in knowing that at least their bullshit has basically NEVER worked out for them in a court. *hug*