Song Fight! Live fight

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Hey folks, the Song Fight! Live livefight is happening tonight (just 3 hours after this entry goes live) and I’m going to have a song and video in it. I would greatly appreciate if folks would watch the live stream and vote for the songs they like, in real time! (And hopefully my song will be one of them. As usual I entered as Sockpuppet.)

UPDATE: The livestream link got janked, see the new one above!

Deactivated my Nextdoor again

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My second experiment with trying out Nextdoor has come to an end, after I gave it an even fairer shot than last time.

I won’t go into the details of what happened because I really don’t want to even think about it, but here’s my “suggestions for improving the site” on my deactivation form:

This place sucks and every time I try it again, it turns out to be irredeemable. Any technical fix I can think of is minor compared to the deep-seated social issues which come about from everything about both the site structure and the moderation model, and it doesn’t help that once you become the focus of toxicity there is no way to escape it.

At the very least, hiding notifications about a post should also hide notifications about people replying to your comments on that post or the like.

All I was doing was letting folks know that a racist word is racist, and I’ve had an unending barrage of people spewing hatred and ire at me for it. I muted the worst offenders but there’s just so, so many.

This feeds into my greater disdain for modern social networking, and every time something like this happens (as well as an ongoing situation on Mastodon that is, again, something I don’t want to really get into right now) all I can say is: I miss blogs, and if you want to follow me, the best way is with a feed reader.

Song Fight! Apart and Together 2021

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In a few hours will be the first night of Song Fight!’s annual live show (done not-quite-live again this year, thanks delta variant). Please give it a watch!

My individual set will be posted to the music section after the show. But watch everyone’s stuff and also join in on the chat. It’s a good time.

Dangit Fiona

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When I adopted Fiona, Werner was grumpy about it but Fiona was so optimistic that she won Werner over pretty quickly.

Now that I’ve adopted Tyler, Fiona is being grumpy and hostile, while Tyler is trying to be optimistic about making friends. It’s such a weird change in attitude from a cat who previously seemed to be friendly and happy about others.

I mean I know I’m being overly-optimistic here. She’s mostly only seen a single other cat for the last 9 years, and her best friend died 5 days ago. Change is hard. She might miss Werner, and I definitely miss Werner. I can’t help but feel like this was a mistake to readopt so quickly, but on the other hand, Fiona was definitely feeling lonely being the only cat around (and she’s been getting frustrated with how Werner hasn’t wanted to play for the last year or so anyway), and it’s not like she’d be likely to get any friendlier to new cats as time passed with her being the only cat around.

I’m definitely sticking with this decision, even if I’m feeling kind of awful about making it. But I also felt awful about putting Werner through stress when I adopted Fiona (right after the stress of moving to Seattle!), and I also felt awful about “replacing Chris” so quickly and impulsively when I adopted Werner.

Tyler hasn’t even been here for 12 hours yet, and it always takes time for anyone to adjust to change. I’m optimistic that they’ll be friends soon, even if not right away.

I remember it took a month or two for Toby to warm up to Shooby, and then they were the best of friends. Every cat pair has a different dynamic which emerges on its own timeline.

I just want Fiona to be happy, even if that means she’s very upset for the next little while.

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Hello, Tyler!

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It hasn’t even been a week since Werner died, but Fiona was clearly in need of another friend, and I figured that I should get her one while she still had a chance of retaining her mothering instinct which made her get along so well with Werner.

So, I went to the Burien animal shelter and asked to see a couple of cats, Tyler and Wasabi, and explained the situation. The person there said Tyler would almost certainly be a perfect choice while Wasabi would have posed some problems. I met them both, and Tyler immediately got extremely affectionate and friendly to me, while Wasabi was a bit more murdery.

Anyway, right now Fiona is upset that there’s another cat in the house, but not so upset as to actually fight him. She’s hissing at him a bunch and occasionally growling, while Tyler is behaving the same to her as she did to Werner. It’s an interesting dynamic. (And, of course, Tyler is the same age that Fiona was, and Fiona’s the same age that Werner was.)

I expect it’ll be a few days before things settle down, but hopefully they will without too much bloodshed. And hey, they’re already hanging out under the bed together. Ish.

Meanwhile, I need to remind myself that I’m not replacing Werner, I’m just continuing the chain of affection.

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Planet Planet

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On IndieWeb chat, a question recently came up, namely the origin of the term “planet” when it comes to a news-aggregating site. I was a little sad to see that nobody else in the chat remembered!

Back in the day, there was a website, Planet Quake, which was a hand-curated collection of all the news about the game Quake. This led to a bunch of other gaming-related “planet” sites (such as Planet Dreamcast), and then the company behind it, CriticalMass Communications, eventually got into other areas of reporting. Eventually they sold to GameSpy, which in turn eventually got bought out by IGN1.

At some point, a couple of other sites emerged with the name “planet” as what I believe was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “planet” gaming sites. Planet Debian is the first one I remember seeing but I have no idea if it was the first to exist. Many of these sites were built using auto-aggregation from the then-new RSS protocol. This joke ended up spreading pretty far and wide and at one point there was even a “planet planet” to keep track of all the planets2 (although it seems to have gone down sometime in 2017).

A fun side note, Something Awful was originally a spinoff of Planet Quake; at the time Lowtax claimed it was because of a “falling out” but that may have been an attempt at satire. In retrospect, he might have named it “Planet Awful!”

Another day

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People keep on reaching out to me about Werner, which I greatly appreciate. I feel like I had gotten most of my grieving out of my system during the two months leading up to his death, though. Ever since I buried him yesterday I’ve felt, for the most part, fine. A certain clarity, a fog has lifted, and all that. I think my worry about Werner had been weighing me down greatly and now that he’s resting forever and at peace, everything is fine. Or at least better.

I’m still sad about his absence, and when I think about his final moments or look at any of the mementos I tear up a bit. But they’re mostly tears of joy, I think.

Fiona’s also gotten a lot happier too. I think she was spending a lot of time worrying about him and trying to take care of him, and it was wearing on her. Today she was extremely cuddly and affectionate with me for the first time since… well, since Werner got sick, I think. And she had a lot more energy for playing than in recent memory, too.

Today I stopped by his little grave and said some words to him, and Fiona came over too and sniffed a bit and rolled around. I think she can maybe smell him in there. Of course I’m going to visit him every day or so in order to water the hydrangeas, and I’ll probably be saying hi to him each time for a while, but as with all things that’ll probably fade. But I had put a Werner pin on the fence behind him, just a little reminder of him to see each time, at least until a raccoon steals it for being too shiny.

(Okay, thinking about visiting him makes me cry too.)

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Werner, 2021/08/06

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It’s been a few days:

  • Hurt: 5; he doesn’t seem to be in pain, but his belly’s gotten extremely distended making it hard for him to find a comfortable position, and his breathing’s a bit shallow
  • Hunger: 8; still a hungry little man, still excited to steal my food in particular
  • Hydration: 6; he doesn’t seem to be drinking as much now, and his eyes are constantly watery
  • Hygiene: 3; his poop has turned reddish/coppery and smells awful, he doesn’t bother to clean himself and doesn’t let Fiona clean him either
  • Happiness: 2; he’s still interested in food, he still purrs when petted, but he’s basically checked out
  • Mobility: 3; stumbling, he’s still peeing in the box but just poops wherever
  • More good days than bad: 3; he tires out quickly and just falls over where he stands, and he’s had a couple of minor seizures
  • Total: 30; according to this, it’s time.

I’m not ready to let him go.

And more importantly, I don’t want to drive him to the vet. I don’t want to put him through that.

He still is passionate about eating and he seems to get a lot of pleasure from it. Is that worth keeping him around for though?

I’m hoping he dies peacefully in his sleep. I hope he isn’t in pain. I hope it comes quickly for him.

The in-home euthanasia services cost $400. Maybe it’s worth it.