i think kids online should really get back to making internetsonas instead of whatever fuckshit this is with putting their entire real faces, names, ages, and such everywhere. you’re not gonna realize how nice internet privacy is until you dont have it anymore and no chance at getting it back. make up a guy and a name and just be that online. make up conflicting details about your completely made up backstory. make a fursona or something
Autistic people are like, “yeah I love following rules” and then proceed to rip apart the gender binary
I love following good rules. bad rules keep me from following better ones so I put them through a meat grinder and see what happens
The official rules suck, I have written my own.
the rules have to be consistent or they’re not the real rules
there are very few things less consistent than the gender binary
That’s not a contradiction at all. “I love following rules” means “I love having clear instructions instead of them being implied”. It doesn’t mean “I love obeying authority” or “I love conforming”.
People: gender is a RIDGED, SOLID THING and it only looks like THIS
Me: why
People: Because!
Me, arming my catapult: Hold on a sec i wanna test something
THIS.
Sensible rules make sense. Do This thing in This way or That will happen.
Easy.
“b/c that’s how we’ve always done it”?
yeah fuck that noise
Suddenly it makes sense why I’ve averaged more than a job a year for my entire adult life…
i’ll tell you what converted me to being all-in on keeping cats indoors only:
living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.
i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they’d grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn’t come close enough to touch or catch.
unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.
there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.
we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)
and we watched them die.
we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.
it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.
too many goddamn times i’d walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.
one in particular, i wish i hadn’t found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.
i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.
and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.
and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.
all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn’t matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.
they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.
it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.
it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.
the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.
but i know cat people, and cat people who don’t know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.
keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it’s not protecting them. it’s not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn’t be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.
they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they’re at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they’re at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.
and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i’m endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.
if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it’s family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,
keep them indoors. not part time. always. exclusively.
if i was god I would make dick and pussy look way more complicated so that when people say “lol that looks like a genital” it would be more warranted. it’s too easy for something to be accidentally phallic. give that thing a handlebar mustache
i love working at an aquarium i just witnessed a grown man with children enter the freshwater gallery and loudly exclaim “oh shit, piranhas are REAL?!?”
Just so we’re all on the same page with the writer’s strike.
If during the strike, it’s announced about AI generated shows. We are not watching them. Not even out of curiosity. Let them fail every AI generated show they try make.
The human voice can not be replaced by AI. Don’t let them try.
sorry for veggieangelism but really you can put pretty much any veg in the oven for 20 minutes at 400 covered in olive oil, salt, pepper, onion+garlic powder and have it be good
I stared at “veggieangelism” for way too long bracing myself for the most batshit veggietales related subculture discourse that also had some sort of overlap with real life evangelism to follow
