Hey! I&#x27;m lurking here

Just figured out something about Diesel that makes me feel like such a dumbarse

luck-system-shenanigans

do share please

So for those who don't know, Diesel is a typical housecat. He has typical cat behaviours and enjoys typical cat things. He's my neighbour's cat, not mine, but I feed him even though I probably shouldn't, mostly because somebody has to.

Like most cats, Diesel enjoys tasty food. He gets wet food each afternoon and can get pretty pushy in the hour or so pre-food, which is normal for cats. Sometimes, he also gets pushy at random times of the day, including a couple of hours after already having wet food, which is also not unusual for cats, so I just chalk it up to his annoying cat behaviour. It'll be a few hours after his dinner and he'll stand in front of my computer screen staring at me and I'll go to make a coffee and he'll run to the fridge and meow at me, and grab my leg when I try to leave the kitchen; it's all very annoying but hey, some cats are annoying, whatever. It's particularly annoying because he mostly seems do to it when I'm super hungry and then it feels awkward to fix myself something while he's looking at me like this, then pushing him away from my food, and somehow after I eat he's never

He does it when I'm hungry.

If you can see where this is going then you're a lot smarter than me, because it wasn't until this week that I started paying attention. When Diesel started badgering me and luring me into the kitchen, I started going. I started making myself some food. I sit down to eat it, he jumps up to smell it like normal; I push him away like normal and he goes to eat some of his dry food (the same dry food that's been there all day but he's been ignoring and bugging me instead) while I eat my soup. Afterwards he stops bugging me and either goes off somewhere to do his own thing or comes over for a snuggle.

Diesel's not leading me to the kitchen to ask for wet food. He's leading me there to tell me to eat. I'm being fuckign. Handled. By a half-stray housecat.

He's currently purring at me and asking for post-dinner snuggles but it just feels condescending now.

Me: Diesel do not eat my soup.

Diesel: I am confirming that you have food and not yet another craft project to get lost in. Good. Now I will go to my bowl and we can eat together.

teaboot

We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

teaboot

Like that story isn’t about an ugly duckling that grew up sexy, it’s a fucking swan was judged as a duck and hated itself as a duck until it found out it wasn’t a duck and stopped trying to be a duck.

The actual ducks in the neighborhood were probably still looking around at perfectly normal swans like “damn, look at those busted ass ducks”

This is pretty important, actually. The good ending is finding the other swans, not tearing yourself to pieces trying to impress the ducks.

elodieunderglass

although a lot of adaptations skip over this and sanitise it to the point where the message is apparently meant to read "you'll be forgiven for being born wrong, if you turn out thin and white and pretty!" - there's a lot going on in the original. For one thing, most adaptations present him as a wild animal, but the Ugly Duckling is born into captivity, into a society that mimics upper-class pretensions, which is why he's declared 'ugly'. His mother is loving and very generous at first - hatching him despite the inconvenient incubation period, and defending him firmly - but after the other domestic animals (including a higher-class dominant one) point out what a burden he is, she turns on her child. Previously, she genuinely appeared to like him.

And a thing that's missed, while kid's abridged adaptations miss out on the rest of the point, is that the Ugly Duckling decides he can't live like this and leaves the farmyard; he goes into the wild himself. In the various passages in which people try to keep him as a pet, or a duck, it's hammered home again and again that this does not make a good pet. there is nothing in him that suits being a domestic animal.

one of the particular parts that makes you go "sweet jesus, hans christian andersen" is where the wild geese rock up and are nice to the young swan, not quite recognising him as a swan but saying they're pretty into whatever weird vibe he has (is this a sort of queer recognition thing? we are told, explicitly, that the wild geese are both male, and they definitely say "you're so ugly it's hot - come with us" - given HCA, it might be) and then they're, you know, instantly shot dead. Because that's what happens to wild geese. They like your vibe and try to take you with them, and even offer to teach you how to flirt - and then you see exactly what happens to them. And then every encounter from there, from the old woman who attempts to keep him - a very satirical and funny passage - to the young family who genuinely attempt to save his life (but he's too fundamentally panicked and awkward to reciprocate their kindness, and explodes out of their house in a social catastrophe) the story hammers in: not only are you a terrible duck, but you just aren't MEANT to live with people. You're closer to the things they kill than the things they keep.

but yeah, adaptations miss this often: you have to go out into the wild to save your own life. you may die in the wild, and you WILL die where you are. nobody comes to save you - and nobody really could have, when you were younger - but ultimately, mate, you just aren't a very good pet. Of the list of "attributes of a domestic animal" you really suck, in detail, at all of them.

so it's very telling to me that the good ending is the one where he is a wild animal - but more importantly, a WILD SWAN.

Not killed. (like a wild goose).

Not kept. (like a duck).

but a secret third thing, that swans - of few creatures - get. they get admired and they get paid and they get LEFT ALONE. they have a position in relation to humanity, and it is BEING A LOVELY SWAN OVER THERE.

what a thing for a lonely heart to yearn for!

elodieunderglass

I saw some notes saying "oh wow I need to look up the original." It's very easy! It's here: The Ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Andersen on Project Gutenberg. It is 3500 words or so and free.

The Ugly Duckling isn't a "fairy tale" or a fable. It didn't emerge from the collective unconscious - it didn't come from nowhere. It's an original work. Andersen wrote it in 1843. It didn't exist before he came up with it. the translation I linked above was translated in 1930.

like many HCA stories (The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen) it's out of copyright and has pretty images, so it gets mined frequently as a free text - you can always republish a cheap Ugly Duckling, and don't have to pay an author. So people tend to just read and remember the various abridged versions. as a result, they think about it like a fairy tale - a sort of ambiguous, detached, floating thing that belongs to everyone and can mean everything. fairy tales - loose cultural fragments - can be hammered to suit any moral, or handwaved to be about anything, and then when you get bored of them, you can "twist" them a different way. Maybe it's about this. maybe it's about that. I read it as being about beauty. I read it as being about me. I don't like the politics. Today King Arthur is going to be Roman. Tomorrow Sleeping Beauty will wake up by herself. it doesn't really matter. And that's grand! that's what fairy tales have become - they are the people's mental property - they're to be played with.

But The Ugly Duckling isn't a fairy tale. it's a single sad, weird queer guy from a while ago, trying to tell you something personal about himself. maybe he isn't communicating clearly, maybe he's too weird, maybe you don't like it, maybe it annoys you - but <TheUglyDuckling> DOES have meaning and intention.

"I think the moral is this / I think the moral is that" - do try reading it first though! do try reading the whole thing first.

coffeefocusrat

you're just mad because you're hungry and tired and your legs hurt and you head hurts and you're too hot and you have depression

what people dont get about divorces is the Whole Thing About Dogs

i have written custody plans for labrador retrievers more complex than i have for children. i went to four years of undergrad, three years of law school, and sat for the bar exam to write up custody exchange provisions for dogs with hyphonated last names

my clients are paying $295 an hour for me to go to court and litigate who makes veterinary decisions for Chuckles the Goldfish and theres literally nothing i can do to stop them

psyfic-deactivated20240227

framing these tags and hanging them up in my office to remind me that it can always be worse

despazito

girls night

dragkingandreweldritch

so I read the article and the story is both less and more insane than it sounds.

basically, there's been an ants' nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.

fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what's basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go "holy fuck" start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.

fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.

spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.

tl;dr it's not "oh noes evil ants are on a rampage", it's "ants forced into a horrible situation to survive get to go home"

Source: https://twitter.com/DAvallone/status/1126280699122671616?s=19

purplesaline

I need you all to understand that if a law could technically be interpreted in some way, even if that was not the intended interpretation, it WILL still eventually be interpreted that way, especially if it harms a BIPOC person.

I’ve written policy meant for legislation, believe me when I saw it’s entirely possible to avoid egregious misinterpretations. If they aren’t doing this then either they’re doing it on purpose or they don’t have the necessary skills/intelligence to be in that job.

animentality

gjjuddmk2

ashleyphrodite

shit's structured like an hbomberguy video

swedishjazz

inthefallofasparrow

seren-starlight

The issue with the daylight savings time change is that people aren't used to falling back an hour or springing forward an hour, and people struggle as they take the time to adjust. But of course, if you only do something twice a year you'll never develop a talent for it. You need to practice if you really want to be good at something! Under my proposal, which absolutely everyone will hate,

Everyone please behold this baby tree:

It's so much smaller than the support posts, they had to secure it with caution tape.

Caution: baby!

One day (but not this day)!

Update:

Thriving!

Now taller than a human person!

In case you were wondering!

Update:

Filling out, and up!

We threw it a birthday party once spring arrived. 🎂

🎉

lee-alder

Today was a pretty shit day. This is a nice post to see. Birthday hat tree.

I hope tomorrow is kinder. 🌱