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.
the post-automattic tumblr employees (automatticians, iirc) that are publicly posting as staff and trying to argue with tumblr users who vehemently hate the site are so adorable. this is how it’s always been. users pretty much hate staff. this is why, in the old days, it was discouraged to identify as staff unless you had the stomach to put up with a bunch of hate mail and arguments.
you’re also not going to win over any users by describing tumblrinas as ungrateful for the site’s existence, or unreasonably angry over recent changes. you’re just gonna look like a 30+ year old engineer taking pot shots at teenagers.
tumblr’s current owner (automattic) got some trust back early in the acquisition when they greenlit some changes users had wanted, and ad-free went over mostly smoothly, but any trust you had was shattered with Tumblr Live. The snarky posts from automatticians are making it worse, the worst offender being the person you have running emporium.
this is how tumblr users have always acted before automattic came in and bought tumblr. this is not new. this is why users say things like “staff is out of touch”.
y'all need to understand this before you try to snap back at angry users, or before you make vagueposts insinuating the tumblrinas are ungrateful.
maybe examine why tumblr users are angry, what they’re angry with, accept they’re valid reasons to be angry, and question why these business decisions are being made. like, “hey yeah why is tumblr live still there if everyone hates it?” or “why does moderation seem worse these days?”.
then maybe if you understand what’s causing the anger when users say “fuck staff” and you’ll know not to take it personally. maybe you can take the urge to post snarky replies and redirect it to questioning your bosses’ decisions to go ahead with these features that are universally hated
no offense to anyone personally but I think we are way too used to and comfortable with weekly releases and if that wasn’t already bad enough, it seems like most of you aren’t even patient enough to wait for the official release date my point is this industry moves way too quickly
The way that people treat with the medium of manga is interesting and sad because a lot of mangaka are disabled and becoming disabled because of the intense workload. The grace extended to legendary author-artists like Togashi should be how all these artists are treated, and more. Your favorite artists are destroying themselves to create the pages you consume and make judgments on and they deserve to take the time their bodies need to recover from these efforts. The weekly release schedule is literally hurting artists.
What’s worse is how they’re expected to do extra work unpaid like exclusive bonus illustrations for retailers and are expected to pay for assistants themselves. Licensing deals with adaptions are fucked up Gureishi is not the only one who has said an anime adaption did nothing for them financially Hideaki Sorachi of Gintama fame has also been open about how little money he has made from the hugely successful Gintama live action projects. Its so fucked up out there for them with no safeguards when their health fails them aside from living off of royalties, and this is an “improvement” from when publishers were fully okay roping manga artists into doing more than one serial at a time or lock them up in hotels with no sleep until they completed their manuscripts
Genji showing up at Zenyatta’s place for one of their morning meditation sessions and Lúcio sleepily answering the door shirtless and wearing Zenyatta’s pants.
the most powerful thing i’ve done is convince my mother that my binder is a “modesty bra” sjfhekdjdjfhjdj i fully have that woman believing that this is a common thing among my classmates who like to dress modestly, which inspired me to follow that trend. i’ve been telling her this since ~2014 and she still says “i washed your bra for you ^_^” when she washes my binder for me
in italy, lesbian parents are being removed from their child’s birth certificate in favor of the ‘biological parent’, regardless if that person ever had a role in raising the child. welsh has been doing this as well. it feels like we’re going back decades.
No, but that’s exactly something that should be put in a museum.
Imagine seeing this two, three, eight hundred years after the fact. Imagine this little girl through centuries of time holding up her hand to show you her most precious rock. It’s potent enough now, this intimate knowledge of a complete stranger, this tiny insight into what was explained to her and what she thought was important and who listened to her long enough to let you see it, but imagine centuries in the future. Imagine this little bit of rock that looks like every other bit of rock, with no context and no explanation to it. And then imagine finding/seeing this little sign, and realising that it was Bethan’s rock. That it was a rock that a little girl loved the look of , and picked up, and carried around with her, and when it was explained to her that museums were places where precious things were shown so that other people could see and enjoy them, the precious thing she wanted them to show, that she wanted to show you, was this rock.
This is what material history is. These windows through time into a person’s life and beliefs and mundane treasures, these bridges across centuries where a child a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years ago can show you her favourite rock.
That is, in so many ways, what museums are for. And well done them for following through.
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.
I honestly think, when you strip away all the cynical (or flowery) rhetoric, that one of the most basic things that make us human is resilience.
We never give up. We always fight, even when there’s no good reason to, even when our mind turns against and tells us to give in. We just refuse to stay down, no matter what is thrown at us. We recover, get back up again, and start anew, over and over, however many times it takes. A quiet, steady kind of defiance.
And what’s more, we actively encourage each other to keep fighting as well. It can be individual actions, like offering encouragement or baking a casserole for someone in a tough spot. But it’s also larger things. Setting up crisis lines for those in urgent need. Mutual aid. Demands for justice. We all try to help each other pull through.
That’s our legacy, as a species. More than anything else, it’s resilience. And that legacy is within you, even if you don’t feel like it. Even if you can’t access it right now. But I bet you already are, without realizing. You’re still here, after all
Well this is me. homestuck, anime, cute stuff, funny stuff, and venting to the world about whats going on in my life. The Eridan is from kinomatika and my Roxy background is from Andarix.
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