Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

ARTIE UPDATE: Artie has clearly chosen a life of crime over her friends. She's in the attic, accounted for and apparently safe.

Peg's insisting we leave her up there for the day, and it's boosting my anxiety over the whole thing pretty fierce, but I guess if it were that unsafe Artie wouldn't be so determined to get up there?!?

And she was quiet up there all night, which scared the shit outta me when she was unaccounted for, but is probably a good sign it's reasonably cozy up there even if she can't get down.

She's missed two feedings now, which I also feel bad about, but she missed FOUR last time, and... well... she's a pudge. She shouldn't be in any danger food or water wise, though I might insist we bring her a little water bowl later.

And I guess she's right, Artie really needs to get some Negative Behavioral Reinforcement about that place, and other than converting her to Full Time House Cat-- which Peg is NOT ready for and I've got mixed feelings about-- I'm out of ideas.

welp, whatever else i can say about this week, my relationship with shadow has not been harmed *sigh*

apologies for the stringy hair, it's been a low-energy day

well i guess i must be a better person than i was five years ago beacuse my stress level finally redzoned and i didn't scream or break things or get angry, my digestion just collapsed and i decided to give up on everything and take a long nap

dammit ladder just arrive

dammit artie just stay on the fucking ground

dammit work just don't lay me off

dammit world just don't catch fire

goodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurdergoodtigernomurder🐯​

Man, am I having a rough time keeping it together today. Absolutely HAVE to get back into a full work schedule today, and my current task is basically timed and monitored.

Meanwhile, got stuck on hold for another HOUR with Home Depot.

And then found out my company is doing a round of layoffs. I THINK I should be OK, but should know for sure by end of week. I think what my team does is pretty core to the company and I think I'm one of the last people on it they'd sack, but...

Still distracting, still pushing my stress a little closer to the red line where I just stop functioning for the day. Especially because there's no resolution with Artie, just more holding pattern as we wait for a ladder and a nice day to observe her.

My biggest fear right now is we'll break down to convert Artie into an indoor cat (at least until we have another solution) and the realty company will either refuse us a pet leave or make it punitively expensive. And then I might just have to murder the owner of the building.

Today is one of those that's got so many *little* things off, I might as well have a big thing off.

Artie's still around. We have no idea what to do with her yet. We're just in a holding pattern until it warms up and we get the 10' ladder we ordered.

The ladder was supposed to be delivered Friday. We called to reschedule and they said "an attempt was made" with no further detail... but we were home, with someone up front, all day long. >_<

So I have to stay home all day and wait out a TWELVE HOUR LONG delivery window. And my dealer's coming by sometime today, but we have no idea when that's happening either.

I have no idea how the hell I'm gonna focus through that AND a somewhat restless housecat who's still settling in. I guess if the ladder doesn't get here today, it's fine-- we're not releasing Artie until the cold snap is over anyhow. But damn, would I like to get this all sorted. >__<

i've had a very strange week and i think it's fair to want to eat something with a large amount of gravy on it

i'm in new orleans ffs you'd think if there were anywhere i could get some gravy-adjacent services at 10 pm on a friday it would be here

FUN FACT: For those of you familiar with Fluorocrash, Parallax, 12Fold, Puzzlebox, and/or No Pizza on Luna...

Surprise. All my creative worlds are set in the same multiversal continuity.

It actually starts with "Charismatic Metafauna," the working title for that biohorror RPG that got sidetracked by Hurricane Ida last year. (I didn't forget!) Humans in the 2050s or so are starting to dabble with psionics and finding the best route is by mining the Terran metagenome for REALLY WEIRD THINGS.

No Pizza on Luna is the next era. The Terrans have seeded the solar system with sapient animal races and basically already fucked up their relationship with them, but they haven't QUITE perfected the memetic WMDs that get them walled off and Unhappened from Solar culture. The runaway social control AIs that rule Terra are the ancestors of the "Sociostats" in Fluorocrash.

12Fold is set a century or two later, after Terra's been good and isolated and the Solar Milieu is pretty much doing their own thing without them. The reality wibbles created by the Stupid Stupid Terrans are just starting to be seriously studied and tamed into something like "magic" or "psi" by the braver/stupider cultures like the "mad" Mercurian raccoons. (Like, if you know Kirschbaer, that's her world!)

I should get back to my day job, but I'll sum up. The distant descendants of the 12(ish) Solarian civilizations are the godlike Jzenh from my Fluorocrash RPG.

And Twin, the starlady from Parallax, is a Jzenh. We're almost full circle. The Vek-0/Vexalynes are descendants of Terrans, freed from their retcon prison by Mercurians too curious for their own good. They blew a ginormous hole in spacetime, transcending and/or destroying themselves in the process, and a reality-altering force called the Melt poured in. Twin was one of them but got stuck in a spacetime glitch during the blast. Vast swaths of the universe are now under radically different rules of causality; Olivia, K, Noa, and Kirt live in one of the SANER parts, with just a little psi and hermetic magic.

And yeah, Puzzlebox is of course what happens after the Melt totally supplants the rest of the universe, and what you get is basically the Supercontext from Grant Morrison's Invisibles. Nothing is True. Everything Is Permitted. You Can Always Just Go Home. Reality has become a purely literary endeavor.

Neat, huh?</joel_robinson>

Today's distraction: getting back in touch with my faith in the IPU.

http://www.palmyria.co.uk/humour/ipu.htm

https://religions.wiki/index.php/Invisible_Pink_Unicornp

And missing the SHIT out of Web 1.0.

I.. I didn't even know there were still furry Twitter randos who thought corporations were unfairly oppressed and maligned.

I thought those people were extinct in BOTH camps.

Yikes.

If the United States is the greatest country in the world, why does every delivery place in town charge twice as much for a Mexican Coke?🤔​

I THINK IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT EVERYBODY HEAR THAT PEEBLES IS A GOOD CAT AND IS GETTING SPOILED AND PETTED RIGHT NOW UNLIKE SOME CATS I COULD NAME WHO RHYME WITH FARTIE

Ah, there we go.

"It's been sorted."

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

So there's this book. General Systemantics, aka Systemantics, aka the Systems Bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

It would be an AMAZING inspiration for the comics side-project I've been nattering about over at https://twitter.com/zebratron2084/status/1484210017117089794 but the only remotely affordable copy I've found is a $7ish Kindle edition on Amazon.

Given the whole fucking comic is about heartless corporate minmax algorithms crippling Terran society, I'd really like to NOT give Amazon any money for this goddamn apparently rare-ass book. And there's probably a cheaper copy, but I really need to get my butt in gear on other projects, like Artie and That Parallax Thing.

So. I dunno if I have any good karma coming, but if anybody would like to help hook me up with this book, with either info or cash (ideally with a SMALL used bookshop with a cheap paperback of it-- or a cheapo OCR, honestly), you would have my undying gratitude. <3

(It's an important book. I know BITS of it. They were very influential. I'll get into it some other day.)

Joe Manchin has now received a very flattering voice mail from a certain Herr Fritz Oberstromgruppen, thanking him for opposing voting rights doing doing so much for "Ze Fourth Rei... I mean ze Nazi Par... I mean ze Republica... I mean America! Sieg heil!"

"motherfuckin' terfs treating my best friends about the same way the Pythagoreans treated the square root of two-- with a combination of outrage, denial, and futile hopes that the gods will intervene"

DR. REZEYA'S SUPER FUN SCIENCE QUESTION OF THE DAY:

Hey kids! Have you ever wondered how many consecutive times Dr. Rezy would need to call Joe Manchin's office and leave a recording of Kate Nash's "Dickhead" in order to be arrested? Let's find out! :D

(I'm not actually doing this. I'm just stopping at one.)

I was joking yesterdaybefore (time is a little loose right now) that I was gonna take the Artie rescue time off as sick days, because it's technically "Family Emergency Health Leave."

Well.

My boss had a friendly question about a project and I mentioned the Artie situation and asked to cash in some personal time while I had his attention.

He said this is clearly a family emergency. I should take it as family health leave if I need it.

FUCK I lucked out. I am increasingly nearing "would take a bullet for my boss." He is the opposite of the opposite of Kim Kitsuragi.

=== SHORT VERSION ===

Stressed but not frantic. Artie is HERE AND SAFE, that's the most important thing.

And I'm... okayish. I just asked my boss if I can take the week off, since I've got the time piled up. I can figure out Artie stuff, talk to the landlord about pet leases, work on That Parallax Opportunity, maybe clean the house up and regather a little sanity.

I'm okayish. I will probably be leaning on y'all for more support and advice soon. But Artie is safe. That's so important and good. (She is also an idiot who learned NOTHING for three days stranded. That is frustrating and bad.)

=== LONG VERSION ===

And if we do have to let her out and she does it all again, FOR NOW the solution seems repeatable.

For now we're probably gonna try keeping her in for as long as she/we can stand it. I'm kinda looking forward to it, honestly? She's a good kitty and has mostly been taking it well. Main lingering fear is landlord stuff since we aren't supposed to have pets on the premises. (Heh.)

But yeah. I'm okay. I'm mostly okay. Watching my funds drain kinda fast while we're in Just Get Through The Day mode. We'll be fine. Lots of good news on Peg's career front.

So here's what else I'm still ruminating about:

The door in the abandoned apartment gets weaker and weaker each time and might not be reclosable next time. We are pondering installing our own latch and key-- it's not like the rightful owners couldn't get in through the front if needed. And fuck 'em at this point tbh. Failing that... I dunno, a lot of good thick adhesive tape to keep it shut between break-ins?

I'm also not thrilled about asking the rental company for a pet lease, because there is a mention in their online docs about "pet rent" and... it's not like we need an increase in cost of living right now. It's definitely never gonna be a solution for all the cats-- they want the pets DOCUMENTED and VACCINATED and there's no way they'd let us have five in there without charging us a fortune at best.

The "bright" spot: I looked at the lease and unless it's a explicitly an eviction-level offense like non-payment or, like, meth lab, the process for violations is possible fine + a "written notice" that we have five days to comply with. We can only be booted on the SECOND offense and it looks like that might even be legally binding on them? So I'm taking that as "you have one freebie." :p

And we've gone, what, 2 yrs and 8 mos now and nobody's hassled us about the cats? The worst we've ever gotten is "Yeah, could you try not to leave so much extra food out? It's summer and there are flies. Thanks!" I like to hope that if we explained the situation to them and made sad enough eyes at them they'd cut us a break and help us work out a solution... Of all the tenant offenses to commit, I think "Broke lease because worried about cute kitties" is one of the more charismatic.