Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

the saddest moments are when you can see the pigeon is actually making its best effort to play chess and you can tell it thinks it's doing really good, like it actually managed to get your king in its mouth and flip it over and now it's confused you haven't conceded yet

appropos of nothing but it's my current listen and the feelies never got anything like the notoreity they deserved, personal top 5 band here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv0HcnTkO54

i have a weakness for chirpy punkpop with bleak lyrics, what can i say, it's a good metaphor for me

the only sad thing is since its raining i won't get to see my new buddy Oscar, unofficial Coffee Science mascot. big chill floppy grey dude who can really take a petting. god i love how casually cat-obsessed this city is.

if twice sold tales is still around, give the locals a scritch for me, ok seattleites?

ok ok more like 6/25 dragon, 6/25 cats, 6/25 work, 6/25 video games, and 1/25 sitting around really stoned and pretending i'm a cyborg catgirl drone but its still less than i used to do :> and i didnt include "eating gourmet food" because that shit just gets into your pores down here without any effort

stuck at coffee science in midcity nola, storm broke out during morning exercise/caffeination. sitting here with a danish and a "chaos theory" (ginger turmeric cider vinegar shot with espresso and a cherry), pondering their fridge of gourmet local ice cream with Actual Magickal Sigils and a goat demon made of ice cream on the label, and thinking all in all this here is a nice place to get stuck

even if my life is 1/3 street cats, 1/3 work, and 1/3 dragon right now. which aint so bad either.

if you know, you know

#busybusybusy

Ergh. Quickie vent because I'm catching up on a million things that got interrupted today...

We got contacted out of the blue by the cat charity that helped us spay/neuter our kids. There is an elderly woman who apparently has fed the semiferals in an abandoned house down our street for 10+ years and had a fall.

We are taking over for her until she recovers "which shouldn't be long" except every time we talk to her there's a new medical woe.

And she's NUTS. Long-winded and oblivious in the way that only lonely old Catholic ladies are. (I'm from Italian Catholics, I'm allowed to say that. I've lived it. So. Many. Times.)

And every time I talk to her, the instructions for feeding these cats get more and more specific and onerous. And include another hint that just maybe the neighbors are actively hostile towards her. And we get to jump straight into that hostility.

I am not looking forward to any of this.

OK, that's not true. There's a really cute tortie living there and I look forward to meeting him. :) But there are a hundred other things about this arrangement that are stressing the shit out of me, because I DISTINCTLY detect the presence of an needy emotional vampire. Like, Colin Robinson grade. >____<

ok a little more research shows that there are two main sites that mention "arithmophilia." Every other source seems to copy from one of them. Both are... pretty neat, actually, but are clearly just etymological wankery.

in fact, one outright admits these are purely hypothetical and were all cribbed from a list of phobias.

https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/philias.html

the other was written as clickbait for a "sex education" website

https://sexducates.com/list-of-paraphilias/

one truly is the loneliest number. harry nilsson, you were a genius. ;_;

genuinely a little sad to see that there's virtually zero usage of "arithmophilia" to refer to an actual kink/paraphilia (i found one google result and it was a tongue-in-cheek list of kinks an artist would do; there were several hundred entries and they were clearly copied from somewhere else)

i can't be the only one, i can't

i wasn't joking

https://twitter.com/zebratron2084/status/1424820818677227524

"numbers on body" is actually core kink for me

i could probably occupy a therapist for three or four months with why because damned if i know and i feel like i should, there's definitely something deep to unearth there :)

Always loved this video (RIP Run Wrake), but only recently noticed how deep the leftist imagery in it runs. Too many old men wielding sharp objects for me to think it's all coincidence...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6kZornX_i-Q

Favorite part starts at 2:45.

Also 3:05 to 3:15. Look at that key around the poor thing's neck. There's no way that's not intended as a metaphor. I love that sequence. It's heartbreaking. It's never felt truer.

#OnceAndForAll #OnceAndForAll

I just spent two hours getting paid to disprove the existence of a single-family home that was bulldozed in Iwakura Nagatani-cho, Kyoto, and I absolutely killed it, and I feel like Philip Fuckin' Marlowe.

Or maybe Barbara Fuckin' Gordon. n.n;

@Phorm @troodon @monsterblue @001zlnv @JulieSqveakaroo @zx3 @sig

Hi, folks! I haven't forgotten about the game but the weekend ended up being unexpectedly low-energy and stressful and I never got anywhere near creative mode.

I think I might take a few weeks to figure out exactly where I want to go with this and make some basic campaign plans.

As warned, there's a serious chance this will not ever get past my ADD barrier, in which case I just wanted to tell you I've been really really enjoying reading your character designs and you at least have my gratitude for participating in my writing exercise.

But I really want this to happen in some way or another and I will try to push through the brainfog and see if we can make this a thing... <3

🖼

a good deed shines like a shaft of light through the darkness

OK, this is kind of funny/interesting.

For work, I'm researching a chain of restaurants that do tableside grilled meats and stone pot dishes. It's got restaurants in Hawaii and Japan.

The Hawaiian locations call themselves "Korean BBQ." But the Japanese locations call themselves "Hawaiian BBQ." And as far as I can tell, their menus are exactly the same.

It reminds me pleasantly of the bit in James D. McCawley's Eater's Guide To Chinese Characters about how common it is to find Chinese-American restaurants whose English signs called them "Chinese food" and whose Chinese signs call them "Western food."

Just finished giving Peebles an epic petting and sent her out for Second Dinner. Meanwhile, Sugarfoot is loafed out on the arm of my office sofa, so I think I'll wait to boot her for the night until later.

It's all very cozy and peaceful here, and it leaves me thinking. "Hmm. These ARE actually the good times."

I'm still a little fretful over the weird test results earlier today, even despite my doctor (who seems pretty good) being unconcerned enough about them that we're waiting until next month to follow up.

I dunno. I'm trying to treasure the quiet moments because I know they can't possibly last forever.

Just as my ears started feeling better, I got a big ol' ingrown hair cyst on my back. And just as I managed to convince myself not to be a big hypochondriac over THAT... my PCP calls me with my blood tests.

Traces of blood and nitrites in my urine, "many" bacteria, and a couple of kidney by-products that are just far enough out of normal range to give me something to fret over.

The lab tech was SUPER rushed and I didn't do a "clean catch" (sterilized wipe and all that stuff) so I'm wondering if the bacteria isn't the result of a contaminated sample. *shrug* As for the blood, it's like the fourth or fifth time this has come up over like eight years.

But I still can't stop my stupid little anxious brain from freaking out over it, even though all my other kidney/liver stuff looks fine and I probably just have a really weird low-symptom UTI at worst.

I dunno. It would be really neat to have a few months without any health scares.

My first girlfriend buttdialed me at 6 am this morning. I only JUST remembered it happened, even though we had a lovely (and probably somewhere incoherent) three-minute conversation.

It was nice. Runnerwolf's a sweetie. Really smart for a canid type. 😺​