"Oh yeah, we have an outdoor Corgi, he just gets so bored cooped up inside all day. He knows to stay off the road. Don't worry, he's way too smart for coyotes and the neighbor's know to look out when they drive past."
"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."
"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."
Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars
A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we
It's 2026, "keep your damn pet in a house or in your view" should not be controversial
I recently had surgery, and at the time I came home, I had both my cat and one of my grandma's cats staying with me.
- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.
- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.
- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.
Last time I had a really bad migraine my cat curled herself round my head and purred sympathetically, and actually stayed there through two of her normal mealtimes. It wasn't until I was able to stagger to the kitchen and grab a protein bar for myself that she gave a very small, polite miaow to the effect of "while you're up... could you get something for me too?"
Ever since then, my kitties make a POINT of sleeping in the border of my bed, to create a "bump" so If I EVER rolled over? I wouldn't fall. They even taught the ones that came after to do the same.
Sure, I have never slept in a bunkbed again, but they don't care. "Mom fell from bed, Mom got hurt, so we make sure Mom doesn't fall from bed again"
I adopted my cat as my ESA, and I'm proud to say she's well-suited for the job. Besides the usual stuff, like helping with grounding and seeking me out during big emotional events, I found out early on she was amenable to some at-home service tasks. Small things, like being a medication reminder and hanging out with me when I've fainted.
What I (foolishly) didn't expect is that she would keep teaching herself tasks to caretake me. She aggressively guards me when I catch an infection. If it's been too long since I've eaten, she will pester me until she watches me put food in my mouth. I had to train her out of trying to drag me to safety after fainting. Just wild things for a cat to choose to do.
So imagine my confusion this year when during the height of one of my scariest health episodes, this same cat is constantly acting up. It felt like she timed it to me finally being well enough to get out of bed. No matter what I was doing, this little grey cat would be right there: pacing, pestering, and absolutely demanding that I lie down to cuddle her. Cuddling isn't even her thing.
Amid trying to settle her, my symptoms would inevitably catch back up to me. So I'd just drag myself back to bed – and suddenly, she was an absolute angel again. And this cycle just kept repeating, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The only time my cat didn't start doing this was when my wifey was around.
Fast forward a couple months. I find out my migraine disorder has progressed (a thing untreated migraine can apparently do) to a rare form that sometimes mimic stroke (a collection of symptoms that can apparently happen outside of stroke). It's a huge relief, but one with big health considerations. Key among them, it means my migraines needed to urgently be detected, prevented, and treated due to the possibility of hemiplegia. So, I start the arduous process of logging my migraines, and aggressively treating any first signs of them.
My cat has continued bugging me during all of this. And while I'm venting about that and going over my migraine logging with my wifey, they suddenly stop me, point at a day I'd marked, and say, "Hey. Wasn't that one of the days she was really acting up?"
It was like a light bulb moment. We went over all our shared messages, cross referenced them with my logs, and yeah. Yeah, my cat had been bullying me for getting out of bed every fucking day I had a migraine. The only days she hadn't were when I'd spent the entire day with my wifey... the person that takes care of me and gets me to bed when my health gets bad.
TL,DR: my cat figured out what was making me sick before the doctors did, made it her job to alert me and enstate bedrest, and only takes a vacation when she knows somebody else can do the work.
[Image description: A grey cat with green eyes sitting with its tail curled around its legs and looking at the camera with a very polite expression. End description.]
jk Rowling needs to be tried in a court and have her assets seized and searched and her wealth confiscated and redistributed while shes on the way to prison
extreme home makeover is a deeply evil show. it's a show where they hunt down struggling working class families and turn their homes into a McDonald's play place with 10 jacuzzis.
here's your doohickey room, dipshit. good luck remodeling your Teletubbie room once your daughter gets older than 4.
your 9 year old mentioned liking the ocean so we turned her room into a Mario 64 level. Every year she gets older it will slowly push her towards inevitable psychosis.
oh you like horses huh?
how much?
imagine your teenaged child trying weed for the first time in the nyan neko sugar room
and while they quadruple the cost of property taxes AND utilities the show runners and like 10,000 underpaid contractors all scramble to finish these houses in under 7 days. all while occasionally breaking out into both song & dance. it is the most post 9/11 protestant show I've ever seen in my life.
[mysterious circle of robed figures]
JK Rowling: hello children
Rowling: finally my evil plan reachesss fruition
Rowling: it'ss taken me yearss of careful planning but finally
Rowling: finally!!!
Rowling: finally we can defeat the sscourge of human rightsss
Rowling: firssst of all i'm not jusst going to sssue amnesty international for money
Rowling: i alsso want an apology
Kathleen Stock: a just request, dark lord
Julie Bindel: no one has been more wronged than you, dark lord
Maya Forstater: careful, dark lord! the other viziers plot against you
Rowling: i want you to find the guy who runs amnesssty international
Rowling: mr amnessty or whatever hiss name isss
Rowling: and bring him here
Stock: i don't think its run by a guy called mr amnesty, dark lord
Rowling: whatever, you know i don't keep up with thiss human rightsss sstuff
Rowling: i want to ssee amnessty destroyed
Rowling: i want to ssee all the human rightss people humiliated, groveling in the mud
Rowling: begging for my forgivenesss
Rowling: right before the boot comess down on their throat
Rowling: i am a beloved national treassssure and i demand my due!
Amnesty: the gender critical movement is fundamentally an anti-human rights movement
Rowling: how dare you!!! don't you know how much money i have?
Amnesty: Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it.
Rowling: finally, i will have my revenge!
Rowling: you don't remember me do you, amnesty?
Amnesty: uh
Amnesty: of course i know you, you're JK Rowling, the famous transphobe
Rowling: that's not all
Rowling: look closer
Amnesty: wait
Amnesty: wait no
Amnesty: it can't be!
Amnesty: you're that junior clerk temp receptionist apprentice part timer that we fired for writing fan fic on the clock!
Rowling: HA HA HA YESSSS
Rowling: AND I'M BACK!
Stock, Bindel et al: She's back!
Rowling: and I'm on the prowl
Rowling: revenge would taste sso ssweet right now!
[many many years ago]
Rowling: [writing] the best kind of wizard is a boy wizard
Amnesty Supervisor: joanne do you have that memo about african genocide i asked for
Rowling: not yet
AS: ok well i need it soon
AS: there's a bunch of genocides we need to deal with
AS: i mean we're real behind on that
AS: look, i'm afraid we're going to have to let you go
Rowling: WHAT!?
AS: it's just that i don't believe that you're really taking these genocides seriously
AS: since you started working here, we've become really backed up on genocides
AS: like, we're never supposed to have this many happening
Rowling: you can't fire me!
AS: we'll have some amnesty goons escort you to the door
Rowling: jusst you wait! i might jusst be sssome nobody now, but sssomeday i'll be a beloved national treasure!
Rowling: like jonathan king or jimmy sssavile!!
Rowling: then you'll be sssssorry!!!
[present day]
Rowling: that'sss right, i planned it all out
Rowling: every night for forty yearsss, i dreamed of thisss day
Rowling: and finally!!!
Rowling: REVENGE!!!!!! HA HA HA!!!!
Rowling: anyway now sssay you're sssorry
Rowling: alsso, here, kissss the ring
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.
Which brings me to my wife.
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet.
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.)
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.
Because.
After several months.
The mini fridge died.
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.
Dogs do not show pain. There are dead in nature if they show it. One way to know if your dog is suffering. Muscels in his back are strained and his biting his teeth
actually if you look into its eyes you’ll see that my dog loves existing. it isn’t biting its teeth, it’s saying “Thank you Creator” and “Creator, I could take more. Go further.” the reason I know this is because I understand dog medicine better than you. but that’s not a reason to be embarrassed.
