Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Fuck it. Missing actual group conversation so much it's painful. Gonna start investigating how to start a Discord server. Will probably regret. :)

hav kiti

this is of course ZERO guarantee she won't go straight up into the goddamn attic the moment we let her outside, but artie's spent a whole day on the ground and that's pretty good

everything else is meh but can't complain, mostly "starland is full of very harsh tasks" and remind me to explain that expression some other day :)

"We made a healthy, informed and democratic decision to get back on churrascaria as soon as possible."

i am otoh PROFOUNDLY tempted to blow $50-100 on Brazilian BBQ delivery in one sitting just as a colossal middle finger to life, the universe, and some poor cow who probably didn't actually do anything wrong

this would be a really easy for to try to get me interested in heroin >_<

i know, i know, i never would-- i've seen trainspotting ffs

but it's one of those weeks where "fuck it, total numbness, and everything else you love just sloughs off of you" almost, almost, for a moment or two at a time, sounds like a good deal

dragon and cats and good food and queer comics sounds like a better deal if i can get it though

multiple failed attempts to contact neighbor living in occupied half of building artie keeps getting stuck in

the first of these was <20 minutes after seeing him out on his porch with the door open and saying hi, which he ignored

so yeah, i'm pretty much ready to write him off as a potential ally here, it's POSSIBLE he just... i dunno, really likes loud headphones or has had to pee every single time we've knocked on his door, or whatever...

i just really hope he's just generally a recluse and not quietly mad at us for being the "crazy cat people"-- my big fear right now is that he's gonna try to call the cops on us or something for bumbling around inside the abandoned apartment

granted as peg has very reassuringly pointed out, new orleans is (a) in the middle of its biggest police staffing crisis ever (b) dealing with a spate of carjackings (c) in the middle of mardi gras so the odds are not bad that he would be literally laughed at if he tried

sometimes it's nice living in what is effectively an anarchy, anyhow no resolution in sight, no plan except for longer and longer periods of leaving artie up there (with a little food and water), currently dealing with it with bad chardonnay and good weed 🤷‍♀️​

i can leave you, my truest friends who made it this far, with only one piece of wisdom: i believe deep down in my heart that all tragedy shall someday inevitably transmute into comedy

So as part of my continuing commitment to sifting through the detritus of our culture for you... I watched a few episodes of Head of the Class, the mid-80s sitcom about a class of gifted students.

Man, it's exactly the heap of bullshit I remembered. This show annoyed me back THEN, when I was barely a teenager, for getting the ins and outs of being a giftie so WRONG. (Dumb shit like answers at their College Bowl-style academic competitions being atomic weights to six decimal places... 🙄 Shit that made no sense, wasn't funny as satire, and just kinda proved to me that this show was written by the dull but hard-working A/B students who ​just kinda KNEW some gifties and had no idea what it was actually like to have YOUR BRAIN ALWAYS ON FIRE IN A BAD BUT VERY PRODUCTIVE WAY.)

Anyhow. It was crap, total crap, just hacky dated sitcom garbage. But the interesting part? One of the episodes was about the future. The kids were assigned to do a newscast set in the 2030s.

And they were all proto-doomers. The whole thrust of the episode was that the ex-hippie teacher (the guy who played Johnny Fever on WKRP) was super-optimistic about The Inevitability Of Human Progress and the kids were all convinced we were doomed. EXACTLY like kids today.

The really jarring thing, though?

Everything they were panicking about turned out... sort of all right. Nuclear war. Nuclear power. Acid rain. Pesticides. The ozone layer.

And it does kinda make me wonder about our crop of worries, dire though they are.

What if there's a universe one quantum hop over, where the Lindbergh Baby was never kidnapped and (presumably) murdered...

...and his fascist-sympathizer, racial paranoid POS dad raised him to be even worse than he was. And we basically get Donald Trump and mainstream American fascism 15 years earlier, except possible with a saner and more competent fascist-- one with a handsome famous aviator, one did a remarkable job of whitewashing the racism off his public image-- for a dad.

If I ever need a one-off villain for an alternate history story, it's Charles Junior for sure. Anyhow, it's a lesson in counting your blessings-- and in some tragedies being a blessing in disguise, one we'll never know about.

I have been dreaming of The House again.

I think I dream of The House maybe 12-20 times a year. It is not a house I have ever lived in, though it has some aspects of my second/current family home, my late (and very kind, and RICH thanks to my late Uncle Mac's 1979 investment in personal computers) Aunt Pauline's mini-mansion in Cleveland, and the Theta Chi house on Case Western Reserve campus.

It's a huge house, much nicer than anywhere I've ever lived in, at least where I wasn't living with 30 other people. Lots of windows. And most importantly, there is the Squeezy Thing.

The Squeezy Thing is a crack in the wall that only I can flatten myself enough to get through. It leads to a furnished, cozily run-down three-room lounge. When The House is in Ohio, it's where I hide all my weed and my *amazing* collection of gigantic sci-fi lookin' dream bongs. Huge plastic bubbly things, @Phorm could make a four-week resort vacation outta any one of 'em. 🧞‍♀️​❤️​

Usually there is Someone Else coming to the house-- the police, the landlord, pod people (but not the fun kind I would immediately surrender to)-- and I have to squeeze in. There's always a huge sense of triumph and mischief around The Squeezy Thing, and some of my worst nightmare are when it turns out They have another way into the Lounge...

Other than that, it's just night after night of phantom cats that need rescuing in some vague undefined way I'm not capable of, and of it being the last day of college and I have to either call my parents and move out in the course of two hours, or talk one of my old friends to take me in.

They never do. Mysteriously, these dreams started happening around the time I got kicked out of Transliminal. C'est l'amour. 🤷‍♀️​

Fifteen minutes later...

*squeakersqueakersqueaker*

She's mashing her li'l pawbs on the front door, her standard way of begging to be let in.

Well, you're asking from THE GROUND, Amelia, so sure. You can come in and hide out from the rain for a bit.

Welp, Artie back outside. We let her hang out for the afternoon as a reward for sticking TO THE GROUND.

I fully expect we're gonna look up and hear SAD MEWING again, but at least we're getting her retrievals down to an exact science. *sigh*

I think next step is flush out neighbor in hopes of getting contact info for landlord. If they blow us off... I start consulting my Mad Engineers friends for advice. I am not above building Artie a ramp and then just busting a b̶i̶g̶ ̶f̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ catdoor in the side door.

Yup. Right on back in the attic.

It's a sunny day, we left her a bowl of water, we have no reason to think she's in any danger up there, and we left the ladder in place so rescuing her should be pretty quick and easy.

It's fine. Short-term, I'm dealing, I'm surprised how low-anxiety I am about this. Long-term... I still have absolutely no freakin' clue what we're gonna do with her if she won't learn her lesson from getting stuck.

Artie's been out all morning and stayed on the ground. We have our first Mardi Gras parades tonight so I brought her back in to hang, to give me one less thing to be distracted by while I try to remember how human gatherings work.

I'm not looking forward to it exactly, it's a lot of noise and social after a really anxious week, but it's SO GOOD for the city that we can do this...

(YES I intend to observe the fuck out of any and all city safety measures, and then some. These are smaller parades and our local COVID numbers are looking quite good. This is a calculated risk and kind of a test run. Although I admit it might be less "do I avoid Mardi Gras this year" and more "do I figure out a way to incorporate an N95 respirator into a zebra mask, pronto." :> )

So Artie was getting really restless, clingy, and nippy and it was driving me crazy.

I need to get work done. I have no time for Crazy Cat Hour. And I realized that the solution to an insane cat is an insane cat.

I let Peebles in. Now they're chasing each other around the apartment. It's complete and utter chaos but at least it's not chaos centered around ME!

I feel like a feline genius.

@hystericempress On a related note, did I mention I LOVE your fuckin' marshpoodle? <3

So here's what I think we're gonna do.

We're pretty sure we've traced Artie's attic route to some spindly trees in the neighbor's yard.

So we just need something to convince her to stay AWAY from those trees.

And we have a couple of friends who are zookeepers at the Audubon.

And they have access to wolf, black bear, leopard, and tiger piss... 😆​

cat is on ground

dealer is scheduled for this afternoon

have easy work on slate

have a bottle of mediocre table wine and six cans of lacroix for spritzers

all is emphatically not right with the world but at least maybe maybe maybe i can have something like a fun day D:

We got her.

Accept this trifle as a celebration.

🎼​We're gonna fill food and water dishes
When Artie comes home
We're gonna buy her a couple fishes
When Artie comes home to stay
We're gonna give her some treats

🎼Sleep on the couch and pettins
Chase Peebs around till the girls say mew
Paw at a glass and break it
When Artie comes home

🎼When Artie comes home
So bad
She's the worst cat we ever had
Princess Poobrain the Dumbhead
At least she's not in the attic
Starvin' til she's dead!

(ORIGINAL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg9RyiPKhx8)

"Yes, you're living in my head rent-free, but much the same could have been said about Senator Martin's daughter and Buffalo Bill. Now be a dear and put the lotion in the basket or else it gets the hose again."