My World

Sarah cares too much about fictional universes.

[wingkink]

btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here

[sparrowlucero]

its kind of distressing how you can tell a lot of people see popular indie artists and writers and such as like "a Celebrity but one which i stand a half decent chance of bullying to death"

[wordcubed]

[big8cola]

great trope

[madeofklay]

My personal brand of humor is "horrible, useless advice delivered in an authoritative way" and this is the result of it

[genderkoolaid]

there's a special kind of ableism (perhaps mixed with ageism) that comes from people who are older adults, who lived an largely abled life, who get like. personally offended by the idea that you, a young person, could DARE to also have a shitty body. like they view bad knees and fatigue as a badge of honor you get from living a long life & young disabled people don't deserve it? because we haven't suffered enough to... suffer? it's fucking bonkers. like yes ma'am I also make old person noises when getting up. i don't know why you feel like I'm taking something from you by being young and crippled.

[genderkoolaid]

also like. its such an interesting experience to start dealing with chronic pain when you're like. 12. and thinking it was normal and being told its probably your fault for being lazy and being basically tortured every day in gym class. and having to deal with the emotional pain of realizing that everyone else your age isn't in pain and tired all the time and the reason everyone glorifies their teens and 20s is because they feel good in comparison to when they get older. and the pain of realizing you'll never have that youth and having to be in high school grieving over all that loss and thinking about how the last time you were able to enjoy exercise without complication was when you were in elementary school.

and then having some fuck who spent DECADES with a perfectly functioning body get snooty with you because they feel like they fucking own the experience of being in pain all the time. "you're too young to be in pain-" yeah you don't think i fucking know that more than you do?

[genderkoolaid]

i wrote this in the tags but someone in the notes reminded me of this story, so I wanna add it to the main post, as an example of what it can look like when older disabled people don't engage in this sort of adult-supremacist-flavored ableism:

When I was in high school, I was once waiting outside of a grocery store for my friend. My cane at this point had a fun moon-and-star/astrological aesthetic design. And, for no real reason, this older Black man came up to me and asked me where I got it, because he thought it was great. I told him it was just something I got offline. He showed me his cane, which was this beautiful hand-carved wooden staff (I can't remember exactly what it looked like, but it was stunning) and he told me about how he got it custom made from a woodcarver in Africa. I never got his name or saw him again, but he lit up my afternoon.

It was a really touching moment for me. He saw a high schooler with a cane and his first thought wasn't that it must be a fashion statement or that I must be lazy or attention-seeking or that it was generally something strange that needed explanation. During this same timeframe I'd also had adults who I'd never met before who would approach me (again, a child) to, essentially, demand I explain to them my personal health issues for their curiosity and entertainment. So it really meant something to me that this man saw me and thought, "What a delightful cane! I also appreciate a delightful cane! I'm gonna ask that kid where they got theirs and show them mine!" without ever needing to make me justify why I as a young person was using a mobility aid.

Carved Wooden Cane Man, wherever you are now, thank you.

[scallioncreamcheesebagel]

you do not have permission to stop caring about vampires just because october is over btw. vampires are a year round event

[qi-mera]

More of you need to learn about these ☝️

[jadenebula]

[hylian-prosecutor]

Tell me how I'm supposed to focus on "important things" when sumer is icumen in lhude sing cuccu groweþ sed and bloweþ med and springþ þe wde nu sing cuccu sing cuccu

[asingularcanadian]

If the salary you are offering is not enough to cover the median asking price to rent a bachelor's apartment within an hour commute of where the job site is, not only should you not be allowed to post it but you should also be shot dead so that everyone is saved from your greed and stupidity

[asingularcanadian]

I just wanted to say I love that this post had been picked up by yall and that you resonate with it.

To the people commenting about the commute time still being too long, thank you for making me deconstruct how far the average commute should actually be. At first I scoffed and was like "15 min commute is the biggest pie in the sky" and then I remembered that in many places in the world they actually have mixed use neighborhoods where there's essentially businesses and houses sometimes even side by side but certainly in closer proximity than what we have here so commutes are actually short things you can either walk and transit to or bike where there's infrastructure. Gave me an extra kick of righteous fury.

[louisegluckpdf]

basically what were gonna do is blog

[batwizard]

anyone else live under the assumption that they’re constantly doing something wrong

[hyumjim]

Starting a collection

[hyumjim]

[aerialworms]

Editing affirmations:

I am smart and capable

I can fix that plot hole

I can write those extra scenes

I can make it make sense

It will not take a thousand years

I can set a time limit and stop once I hit it

I can make that deadline

I can make it good enough

It does not have to be perfect

It just has to be done

I can write and I can edit and I can do both and it will be fine

I am improving ever so slowly even if I can't see it now

I CAN DO THIS

[thegenderal]

even before i lived in a place with a massive population of feral cats decimating the wildlife i had read the studies and knew the data said that TNR did not work and we need to be trapping and euthanizing feral cats but now that i’ve lived in a place where there are an enormous number of feral cats it’s like, inconceivable to me that anyone supports TNR, not just for the health of the world but for the sake of the fucking cats

[thegenderal]

nobody will even acknowledge it not even in most conservation circles. We have a solution to a massive, massive problem that is more humane, cheaper, easier, takes less time, prevents animal suffering, and saves valuable members of our disappearing ecosystem. And nobody is even willing to theoretically acknowledge that it exists outside of a few very small circles.

[thegenderal]

it works. It works. It is better for the cats. It’s better for the cats. Living in a place where you cannot drive 10 minutes without seeing a new roadkill cat almost every single day really makes you think about how much suffering could have been prevented if we just dealt with the problem we have created. It’s not a pleasant way to go, being hit by a car. Or being ripped apart by a predator, or eating a poison, or starving to death, of dying of an infection, or an illness, or any of the hundred thousand ways an animal in the wild passes without human intervention. Euthanasia is simply falling asleep. It is fucking wild to me that saying you think we should take responsibility for our mistakes and ensure that cats fall asleep peacefully instead of capturing them and then hurling them back out into the world SPECIFICALLY in order to allow them to die in agony makes people treat you like a fucking serial killer.

[thegenderal]

And if you don’t care about cats dying in agony do you care about the world around you? There’s a species of bird we only know ever existed because someone’s cat brought home our only example. That’s horrific. We’ve lost so much biodiversity because we simply won’t listen to the research, which again, has proven that TNR is not effective.

[thegenderal]

a peaceful death is not the worst thing that could happen to an animal.

[thegenderal]

@cathartidae sources for ya!

Sources:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/UW468 “How Effective and Humane Is Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) for Feral Cats?” 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6523511/ “A Case of Letting the Cat out of The Bag—Why Trap-Neuter-Return Is Not an Ethical Solution for Stray Cat (Felis catus) Management” (also has a thousand references attached that are handy)

Not a reference so much as the human society actively admitting that TNR does nothing to decrease population, actively contributes to harming wildlife, and doesn’t actually help the cats in any way, just reduces some of the nuisance behavior that people complain about: https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/real-impacts-trap-neuter-return

Unscientific from here on out as i don’t feel like trying to find the studies i read in like January of last year:

https://hahf.org/awake/the-trouble-with-trap-vaccinate-neuter-return/ “The Trouble With Trap-Neuter-Re (Abandon!) from the hillsborough animal health foundation, articles also link to studies

https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/The-Evidence-Against-TNR.pdf from the american bird conservancy, has scientific articles quoted. 

[thegenderal]

Even More Sources on TNR being non-viable and ways that cats are impacting the world from birds to *hawai’i’s monk seals*

Animal Emergency and Referral Center of Minnesota. (2022, October 26). Indoor cats vs. outdoor cats. Animal Emergency & Referral Center of Minnesota. https://aercmn.com/indoor-cats-vs-outdoor-cats/

Campbell, V. (2017, January 25). The Obituary of the Stephens Island Wren. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/the-obituary-of-the-stephens-island-wren/

Castillo, D., & Clarke, A. L. (2003). Trap/neuter/release methods ineffective in controlling domestic cat “colonies” on public lands. Natural Areas Journal, 23(3).

Coe, S. T., Elmore, J. A., Elizondo, E. C., & Loss, S. R. (2021). Free-ranging domestic cat abundance and sterilization percentage following five years of a trap–neuter–return program. Wildlife Biology, 2021(1). https://doi.org/10.2981/wlb.00799

del Hoyo, J., Collar, N., Kirwan, G. M., & Sharpe, C. J. (2022, October 25). Guadalupe storm-petrel (Hydrobates Macrodactylus), version 1.2. Birds of the World. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/guspet/cur/introduction

Dickman, C. R., & Newsome, T. M. (2015). Individual hunting behaviour and prey specialisation in the house cat Felis catus: Implications for conservation and management. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 173, 76–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2014.09.021

Edge. (2019, June 19). Guadalupe storm-petrel. EDGE of Existence. https://www.edgeofexistence.org/species/guadalupe-storm-petrel/

Galbreath, R., & Brown, D. (2004). The tale of the lighthouse-keeper’s cat: Discovery and extinction of the Stephens Island wren (Traversia lyalli). Notornis, 51(4).

Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources. (2025). Feral cats. Feral Cats. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasive-species-profiles/feral-cats/#:~:text=Feral%20cats%20on%20islands%20have,kill%20approximately%202.4%20billion%20birds.

Loss, S. R., Will, T., & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380

McGregor, H., Legge, S., Jones, M. E., & Johnson, C. N. (2015). Feral cats are better killers in open habitats, revealed by animal-borne video. PLOS ONE, 10(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133915

Medina, F. M., Bonnaud, E., Vidal, E., Tershy, B. R., Zavaleta, E. S., Josh Donlan, C., Keitt, B. S., Corre, M., Horwath, S. V., & Nogales, M. (2011). A global review of the impacts of invasive cats on Island Endangered Vertebrates. Global Change Biology, 17(11), 3503–3510. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

National Research Council. (1992, January 1). Scientific Bases for the Preservation of the Hawaiian Crow. U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235935/

NOAA. (2024, August 29). Toxoplasmosis and its effects on Hawaiʻi Marine Wildlife. NOAA Fisheries. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/pacific-islands/endangered-species-conservation/toxoplasmosis-and-its-effects-hawaii-marine

Read, J. L., Dickman, C. R., Boardman, W. S., & Lepczyk, C. A. (2020). Reply to Wolf et al.: Why trap-neuter-return (TNR) is not an ethical solution for Stray Cat Management. Animals, 10(9), 1525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091525

Reed, L. (2022). The effects of free-roaming cats on native wildlife populations. Wildlife Rehabilitation Bulletin, 40(1), 17–21. https://doi.org/10.53607/wrb.v40.250

Salano, E. (2024, October 5). Eliciting the effect free roaming cats have on Native Hawaiian wildlife using stable isotope analysis. UKnowledge. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/biology_etds/103/ 

Steele, J. H., Thorpe, S. A., & Turekian, K. K. (2009). Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences. Academic Press. 

science says it’s long past time to stop prolonging the suffering of feral cats, for the sake of the people, the native wildlife, and the goddamn cats themselves.

[boundless-ennui]

I was at a friend's house to check on carcasses I had macerating in his yard. A little grey cat ran up to me, yelling her head off in friendliness and wanting nothing more than to be pet. I had nothing to give her but let my friend know he should catch her since she was so friendly. I am ashamed to admit I didn't give her much thought beyond that, finishing my work and giving her a last pet before going home.

My friend told me how he'd seen her before but she always vanished before he could catch her. He works far too many hours and is always tired so he couldn't prioritize catching this cat.

Three months pass with no sign of her. I go back with my partner to check on carcasses and this same little grey cat appears. This time, however, a tooth has been snapped off and her tongue is so badly cut that she can't keep it in her mouth. She was thin and dirty and screaming to please be given some food.

This time I couldn't look away. I asked my friend's girlfriend if I could borrow a cat carrier. She loaned me one and a tin of wet food that the grey cat willingly followed into the carrier. She didn't care at all about being put into the carrier - all she wanted was a hand on her. She'd arch up against the top just so my hand would rest on her back for a moment.

We drove through rush hour traffic to the only shelter still open. We knew we couldn't keep her and I couldn't stand the thought of putting her back out on the streets to die slowly.

The shelter couldn't take her. Her ear was clipped so she was a "community cat" and outside their ability to help. They tried desperately to offer alternatives to me as I cried over her carrier, knowing I couldn't take her home but also that if I didn't I couldn't live with the thought of her back on the streets.

I made a Hail Mary call to a local friend who is very connected in our city. They didn't have my number saved but answered all the same to hear me sobbing about a cat I'd found and to please help me find a place for her. Please. If I don't find something then she'll be alone on the streets again to die.

My friend came through. I could keep the cat in their garage overnight and in the morning my friend would be back in the city and could find someone to help the cat.

The shelter folk gave me a crate and some food - their hands were tied but they didn't want to leave me with nothing. They were good people doing the best they could in their own system. Community cats were ones they weren't allowed to "waste" resources on. Ostensibly they'd been dealt with and their fate decided. There was nothing the shelter folks were allowed to do for them.

I took the cat to my friend's garage. She was settled into a crate on towels, happy as a clam to be warm and safe. This was a cat made to be loved and to love, as she immediately began trying to groom one of my friend's roommates. He stayed in the garage with her, giving her food and water and in exchange having no say on whether she was in his lap or not. She was always in his lap.

Nobby Nobbs (so named for the only other character known to man that is as scrungly as she is) was then formally adopted by my friend. Her tongue has healed, her fur remains scrungly, and she's every bit the rabid love bug I suspected her to be when she came to me yelling to be pet.

She's a TNR cat. Someone thought they were doing her a kindness in that and if nothing else she didn't add kittens to the world but that doesn't negate the pain she suffered before I found her - the broken teeth, the lacerated tongue, the ulcerated cheeks, the flea-bald patchiness of her coat.

I say this as someone who adores this cat and has the privilege to see her loved and cherished: I wish she'd never had to suffer what she did. I wish people were alright making the harder call that leads to less misery on the side of the cats.

TNR is a polite fiction, nothing more. Just so the humans can pretend they've done right by the same cats they're letting loose to die miserably somewhere else. As long as the humans don't see it it's fine.

The shelter folks told me she's a community cat and that I could take her home and release her by my house. Then I could feed her myself and keep up with her and know where she was! I could still keep her, after a fashion.

I am not proud of how I snarled back that I would never exchange a quick death for a slow one. I would be giving her a different funeral plot, not giving her a life. Even near me she'd be just as vulnerable to the innumerable predators that find cats quite delicious, let alone cars and poisons and the other cruelties humans practice on stray cats.

She's the second stray cat I've met that when I held them the cat melted in my arms, purring and so desperately wanting to be loved. The first cat I was able to trap and take to a local shelter only to find when I called to check on him a day later that his health had been so terrible, so beyond help, that he'd been put down. All the love in that tiny body lost because the people I lived beside didn't care enough to trap the cats they had.

My partner was asleep. I woke her up to crawl into her arms and sob, my heart breaking for the stupidity of the humans who hadn't cared enough to grant this poor little cat the chance to be either an indoor cat, loved and cared for, or to grant him a quick death long before I met him. I've other stories of the cats they kept around, essentially feeding the poor souls to the predatory birds and wandering dogs that frequented our area.

TNR doesn't work. It is a lie humans tell ourselves so we can pretend we haven't failed these animals on a massive scale. Cats are invasive and cause massive harm in their turn. It is humanity who needs to deal with this crisis, this horror we've made, and I pray one day we look it square in the face and vow to make it right.

[thegenderal]

sorry

[dykeofalltrades]

for the record, this includes barn and farm cats. ive grown up in a place where theyre common. theyre not better off

[luckyladylily]

This queertember, let us remember that pride is about, first and foremost, being annoying as shit.

[luckyladylily]

Pride is when we remind people just how much of a Problem we can be if treated poorly. That we know how to organize and mobilize and for now we are choosing to use that to throw excessive parties and a parade bursting with enough rainbows and social taboo to send homophobes scattering like roaches in the light. That gay dude dancing down the street in assless chaps and a leather doggy mask waving a rainbow flag is a reminder that we can always go back to throwing bricks instead.

We're here, we're queer, get used to it.

[inthefallofasparrow]

WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM?!!

[inthefallofasparrow]

Standard American responses to this post:

This never happened to me … WTF! Is this even real? This never happened to me … but yeah that checks out This never happened to me … because real kids died instead This happened to me … and it was predictably traumatizing This happened to me … and it was stupid/boring This happened to me … and it was fun (theater kid)

[velvetys]

Everything used to be 20 dollars and now that I finally have 20 dollars everything is now 200 dollars