I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.
A couple people here have suggested wet food to lure the cat down, but when mine found a spot abouve the cabinets that was much easier to get up than down that solution crossed my mind for only an instant before I realized it would probably only take one more go for him to realize there's a huge incentive to risking injury.
He would do this thing when he was angry where he would howl like a dog to make sure everyone within earshot understood the severity of whatever great injustice had taken place, and not taking him down when he wanted to be was definitely one of those cases. I'd give him maybe an hour to get his screaming in before getting around to helping him.
It was a warning to ensure that your discussion include love for the people behind the discussion, and not just hate for them for being wrong.
I think I've gone over twenty years with this being the exact thing that bothers me and have never been able to articulate it as well as you just did in one sentence.
I know orange cats have a reputation for being dumb but mine was by far the smartest cat I've had. He especially had an intuition for communication that none of my others did.
I was generally on top of keeping the water dish full and the one time it's getting low he does a loud meow to get me to look at him and plops down and does exaggerated head turns. He looks at the water dish for a couple seconds, looks at me, turns his head back to the water dish. Just zero ambiguity whatsoever. Hey jackass, do you see what I'm looking at?
I feel very confident my black cat would have handled this by rubbing his head against me in the exact same way he did when wanting attention or literally anything else.
Oh my god that is another level of heartwarming.
I had a cat who liked to be cradled like a baby and I want that back so much. I would do it some with the boy we got after, but I kind of knew that was more for me and he was just tolerating it.
Not exactly the same but my boy and I did showertime together for probably seven or eight months when he was a kitten and the day he grew up broke my heart so much.
Our shower had an outer curtain and a transparent inner curtain and he would stand between them and watch the water come down while I would shower. It was his favorite part of every day, if he was in another room when I turned on the water he would start screaming and absolutely bolt in, like he was upset I had started without him. It was so cute and his enthusiasm was infectious.
After six or seven months he started treating showertime less as recreation and more as an obligation, his enthusiasm was waning and sometimes he'd arrive late and cranky from being woken by the faucet.
And then one day he didn't come. I knew that day would arrive eventually, but it still hurt a lot at the time. With more time passed though, that half-year+ of showertime being his favorite part of the day are memories I really cherish.
I was making fun of the guy who was arguing with her. That's why at the start of the very next sentence I said I was not being serious in the part you quoted, and then right after saying that I called out that exact behavior.
I get that sarcasm isn't always easy to detect online so I wrote a second short paragraph to explicitly clarify that the first was sarcasm. Sorry for being annoyed but I feel kind of frustrated that still wasn't clear enough to avoid getting condescended to.
When women talk about the problems they face, it's not helpful for you to go "That doesn't happen".
Your bias is showing, that's not a helpful response when anyone talks about their problems. Not just women.
Talking more seriously (but not that much more), I have some appreciation for being this brazen in the whole "I live in the real world and know women aren't shown disrespect out of nowhere by men they don't know, unlike you women with your lived experiences" shtick.
Hearing a girlfriend express a lack of confidence because she wouldn't get accosted kind of fucked me up. A moment of realization that the way the world is is so drastically different from the way I want to believe it is, I didn't know where to start.
I try to build a habit of reacting to feeling upset with behavior by thinking up a situation that could lead me to act in the same way, but I really struggle to imagine what would make someone inclined to approach a stranger on the street with this kind of comment.
Totally unrelated, but I've seen comics from this artist before and they've always given me weirdly unsettling vibes. I can't really pinpoint if it's the dialogue or the art style.
It's almost frustrating to play something with no intended path because it takes away my option to deliberately take the wrong one.
I play games this way too, but I feel like the bigger factor in my playtime way higher than necessary is that I don't want to miss any dialogue so I talk to every NPC until they repeat themselves. Most of the time that's the second time you talk to them so I definitely get a lot out of that.
Things have been so hard lately. I appreciate you reading. Thank you.
So many stories. This turned into such an essay. Maybe no one will read this but there's some catharsis in writing it.
Buddy was my best friend. He found my wife when he was a kitten, probably around seven months old. He followed her to her car on a rainy day a few days before Thanksgiving. His name was "Widow" for probably two or three weeks, my wife told me he was a girl and I just never questioned that. We were watching Elf at the time she discovered her mistake, so that's where his new name came from.
We talked it over and we thought adding another cat would be a bit much with what our financial situation was (stupid rent increases for adding pets), so I took him to the closest animal shelter. They asked where we found him, I answered honestly and they said nope, we only accept cats found in our town, there's a fee otherwise. I didn't know I was supposed to lie about that, my bad.
Our town didn't have a shelter, but we were told to take him to animal control and he'd be moved to the shelter associated with our city. So I took him there, explained the situation. The first thing I was asked was "Did you feed her"? Yeah, it's a kitten that was stuck out in the rain in the evening, of course we did. She explained to me (this still makes no sense to me, if anyone has an explanation please chime in) that by default if you feed a cat without an owner you legally become its owner, and that 49 states have reasonable laws to override that default but since Michigan has no laws about feeding strays on the books, I'm the owner. $100 surrender fee to give up a cat we own. Didn't know I was supposed to lie about that either, my bad.
We gave him to my wife's sister and her boyfriend and Widow spent that entire night shitting all over their furniture and my sister-in-law demanded we take him back. At this point he's our cat.
He never pooped on our stuff, but we knew there was an issue. I swear I brought like ten stool samples to the vet over his first year and they all tested no parasites. He was kind of a dumbass and at one point he ate some bristles off our broom and threw them up with a yellow worm-thing coiled around one, I didn't see it but my wife took a photo. I showed the vet and they gave him parasite meds which solved his issue for good. It's not something you hear people saying too often, but thank god my cat ate that broom, who knows how long he would have stayed sick for. For the record, if that happens, the recommendation is to put the worm in a baggie filled with water to bring to the vet, as opposed to taking a photo for evidence before trying to get it as far away from you as humanly possible, which seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time.
Before getting him I always pictured cats as graceful animals, but he was so goddamn clumsy. Early on I was playing with him trying to get him to hop into a cardboard box that was not much taller than him. I threw a treat inside, and he looks over the edge of the box to see it and thinks it over. He hops into the box but hits his hind legs on the side of the box and faceplants. Oh my god dude. He jumps back out okay and I'm like let's try this again. He does the exact same thing a second time, he hits his hind legs and faceplants.
Buddy's thing was he would sleep like he had just been hit by a car. Our repeated joke was to look at him and say "RIP". Some examples:
The plastic shelves he's asleep on in that last photo were stacked above our dresser for extra storage. That was his most frequent sleeping place, it was to the right of my head, but way above. One time I was waking up from a nap and I'm like half-asleep and see him stretched out like a dead animal on the edge and I start thinking "this asshole's gonna fall". Then he started sliding off and when he woke up he tried to cling to the edge, but that just pulled the drawers and they fell with him. For an instant I was terrified that they were going crush him but I saw him sprinting out of the room before I really had time to process.
There was a period of time where he was very curious about the world outside the apartment and we would have to prevent him from running out the door. He eventually snuck out at one point when someone came home late and we didn't pick up on it until morning. Right outside our door was mostly stairways, so I went down the stairs looking for him. I was calling for him walking the stairs and he wasn't coming like he normally would, it was terrifying. When I got to the cement floor at the very bottom he walks out from the darkness under the stairs and starts screaming at me, face completely covered in cobwebs. He never left home again after that.
Buddy would flail his tail when he was happy, he was the dog I always wanted. He loved being the center of attention and loved hearing his name. He would be passed out dead and I would whisper his name very quietly and his tail would do a single flail.
One time I was getting ready for my day at grad school like any other and I realized I forgot to close my shirt drawer, thought it was odd because I've never done that before. Whatever. I come back about nine hours later and he is not at the apartment door to greet me like always, instead it's my antisocial cat. When I walk into the bedroom she starts pacing around in front of the dresser and my heart sinks into my stomach when I make the connection. There's something to be said for moments of terror out of concern for someone's well-being that turn into pure comedy the instant you realize they're fine, he does a huge stretch and hops out all happy, best sleep of his life. Black cat curled up on black shirts in a black dresser. Later that evening I catch him opening the same drawer with his paw. He had just taught himself a new trick without having the courtesy to notify me about it.
I had long covid and was not doing great, but the pandemic was the really the best time of Buddy's life. He was so happy that we spent most of our time at home. Our other cat hated it though.
The night before our second wedding anniversary, we were talking about how it was sad we couldn't take off work to spend the day with each other. The next morning my wife is awake before me and Buddy is in pain in the litterbox, trouble peeing. Drive him to an animal hospital and we have to put him down. It was completely out of the blue. He always liked to be cradled like a baby and he died in my arms that way. We both took the day off to mourn.
RIP Buddy Monster
I had a cat named Buddy, and he would get up to a lot of mischief so we'd often refer to him as "the monster". Once you start calling your cat "Buddy monster" you'll find you're a very short distance from "monster of buddies I'm pulling your strings".
Here's Buddy after wrecking his Christmas-themed RV:
Now that I think about it, I've also spent my whole life with a very vague idea and ultimately only pretending to know what that word means.
I found an explanation here. They're deliberately not including it in the main f-droid repository for security reasons.
I think it's extremely unlikely that there's a reason other than what they've stated here, but at the same time this isn't so important to me that I'm willing to begin making exceptions to my policy against installing any software that doesn't make it into official f-droid.
Yeah I like a few of these.
edit: I think it's the ones that are just generally silly with no real attempt at a punchline that appeal to me.
It is kind of depressing to be honest. I'm antifascist, I just happen to also be a loser.
When in a healthy relationship it doesn't bother me, but now that I'm single again and will be looking at revisiting the whole dating thing at some point it's uncomfortable to think too much about.