Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@JulieSqveakaroo I admit I don't really understand the VTuber thing very well, but maybe you could do something like that "Inugami Korone" does -- we could getcha a sqveakroo avatar and some kind of voice coder, pump you up and let you go... I'd love to see that, honestly. <3

Goddammit.

That moment when you realize someone you've been following on Twitter is someone you REALLY DIDN'T LIKE in their previous incarnation... but you LOVE them in their current one, so... you just gotta shrug and roll with it.

Oh, well. (It's not any of you, someone from the LJ days whose political hyperbole and smugness drove me crazy. But they're... apparently... pretty good now?!)

Jumpy and twitchy as hell this morning, but it's actually due to massive excess caffeination and not, say, any current or anticipated feline crisis nor uspol. (All the kids showed up this morning, except for CJ who is the shy one, so I suspect they survived last night's fracas just fine.) So that's unexpectedly nice.

Also there is a REALLY pretty and friendly half-Dalmatian sniffing around my table at the cafe. Which is also nice. I gave them a little scritch and got moistened digits for my troubles. Yuck. 😽​

I have acquired a copy of the critically acclaimed Turkish documentary Kedi ("Cat"), about the lives of street cats in Istanbul.

Said lives are apparently pretty cushy -- Istanbul is famously cat-friendly -- but I still don't think I'll be able to watch it until my general Cat Anxiety Level settles down.

Fuckin' Bast, last night there was a horrible yowl followed by some faint Sad Cat Noises and I've been fretting ever since that somebody's not going to show up again. That's probably a ridiculous fear, over what was probably a two-second non-injurious cat squabble. But that's my life right now.

On the other hand, my life is also about 20-minute scritching and petting sessions, and that SQUINT OF LOVE they give you when you scritch their throats just right, and cat-fishing derbies with the Jingly Man, so I don't think I'd trade it. Even if those little bastards are going to break my heart someday for sure.

I mean, I know for sure I'm gonna get it broken a little in around five weeks, when we adopt Liv and Snowy out. I look forward to having my office/study back but I bet I'm gonna cry a bit when they're gone. I really hope we can stay in touch with whoever adopts them, maybe visit.

Anyhow. Yeah. Apparently, there's a recurring theme in Kedi of "taking care of homeless cats gave me a sense of redemption when I really needed that." And yeah. Now I get it. I kinda really needed it too. Even if we fuck something up or lose a friend someday, those cats have better lives than they would have.

I hope that doesn't come off as conceited. Honestly, taking care of these cats has not technically been that hard; every human parent on earth is a fucking legend compared to us. But after bombing out in Seattle and feeking like a pariah, yeah, taking care of these guys and not feeling like I'm totally blowing it *is* redemptive I REALLY NEEDED THAT.

Fan theory: Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock is a misincarnate Janet from The Good Place.

@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!