humanist + humorist

Marshmallow Fluff’s vet visit back in May found that his teeth were in pretty bad shape, so he got scheduled for a follow-up dental visit. For some reason, even though the actual dentistry was scheduled for the afternoon, I was supposed to drop him off between 7 and 8 AM. This blatant bias in favor of morning people, I swear…

What I ended up doing was, went to bed around 2 AM as usual, set my phone alarm to go off in an hour. Woke up with the alarm, checked my current Stupid Phone Game (this was a perfect time interval for it, all my trains would be back in the station and ready to send out on new jobs), started the timer again, went back to sleep. Rinse and repeat.

The fluff was hanging out on the bed with me this whole time, until (of course) between 6:30 and 7 he decided he had important cat business elsewhere. Fortunately, a little before 7:30 I lured him back up, dumped him in his carrier, and we did make it to the vet by 8.

(He was so grumpy. So betrayed. It’s a hard life.)

Turns out he needed a tooth extracted, and had an infection in the gums underneath that got cleaned out, and came home with some pain medication that I’m supposed to squirt into his mouth every 8 hours for the next week. (I’ve managed it once. If he tolerates it every 12 hours, I’ll call that a success.)

On the plus side, they were concerned he’d have a hard time chewing at first, so I put out some wet food for him…but within an hour of getting home he was sneaking off to steal Fiddlesticks’s (dry) food. I restored his normal menu, and he’s been chowing down like nothing changed at all.

Got that poodle foot where they shaved his leg to put the anesthesia in:

Kinda regretting that I didn’t ask them to give his whole body a therapeutic shave. It would make him more comfortable in however many more heat waves we get this summer, and I would get to do less vacuuming for a while. But eh, too late now, he’s home again, and I’m not dragging him back to the Evil Place for another year!

Hauled the fluff to the vet the other day. (No photos of the adventure, I’ll garnish this post with other cat pictures.)

He had an appointment — just routine checkup/vaccines — but went into hiding an hour and a half before it was scheduled, and didn’t let me within arm’s length of him for the rest of the afternoon. Wasn’t until after dinner that his guard went down…so I dumped him in his carrier, threw a blanket over it, and called a car.

The receptionist was willing to go with it, but a little puzzled. “Did you have an appointment?” He’s missed two already, I’ve given up on getting him here at a set time. “It’s emergency hours, so we’ll charge extra…” This is when I got him here, I’ll pay for it. “He’s not having an urgent medical issue, so we have to see the emergency patients before him.” No problem, I will sit in the lobby and wait.

(It didn’t end up being that pricey. And it was only an hour wait! Didn’t even get through a page of my AO3 To Read list.)

They don’t let me sit with Fluff this time, for whatever reason, so the next news I get is when a vet comes out and says “The cat is…not cooperating. We can give you some meds to calm him down, not charge for this visit, and have you bring him back for another visit after taking them?”

I pitched the idea of coming into the room and personally holding him. The vets decided to give it another go themselves, finding the person on-duty with the most cat-specific experience.

Another update: “We have the vaccines all ready, and we are prepared to give him the shots! Just as soon as we catch him.”

And, at last: success! They packed him back in his carrier, and I got him home.

Both shots went in the same hind leg, which I understand isn’t standard — but they managed to bundle him up with one leg accessible, so they grabbed the chance while they had it.

Once I unleashed Fluff into the house, he immediately slunk off to hide under the bed. As expected. Less expected: it was only about 20 minutes before he reappeared, and he was letting himself get close enough for cuddles by the end of the night?

Wish I knew what was going through his fuzzy little head. Has he learned “vet visits are a rare break in routine, so once you get home, you don’t have to be afraid of being dragged right back”? But it doesn’t seem like he’s figured out “vet visits are short-term events, just sit tight and it’ll be over soon.”

Eh. Important thing is, he’s home, he’s safe, he got a pile of treats in compensation for his trauma, and Fiddlesticks only ate half of them. Good times.

Marshmallow Fluff, first 48 hours: This place has one (1) safe spot, under the bed, and I will stay put right here forever

Chocolate Fiddlesticks, first 5 minutes: I will systematically stand on every available surface to choose my Pride Rock

…so, yeah, I got a new cat.

Way back when, I decided “if the fluff can get through a year with no emergency health issues, I’ll see if he can handle a second cat.” The deadline passed recently, so I’ve been watching the “Meet the Cats” page on the local cat cafe. A lot of the cats get snapped up pretty fast, but this one black-and-brown tortie just stayed and stayed and stayed…

I went in, decided I liked her, and called dibs.

Fiddlesticks is twice Fluffy’s age (10 years), half his size (a little old lady!), and 100% his opposite in temperament. She’s been here for a week, and was totally comfortable from minute one.

She came with the “fiddlesticks” part of the name, which I’m retconning to mean “chocolate fiddlesticks” so we can keep having a dessert-based name theme.

At first I kept the fluff in the bedroom with the door closed, Fiddles in the kitchen with a makeshift barricade in the doorway, and I traded off which one got access to the rest of the house.

Kept both of them shut in at night just to be safe, which worked out, because it turns out Fiddles really really wants to be where the action is. Jumped over the first barricade…jumped over the taller replacement barricade…couldn’t jump barricade #3, but managed to knock a box askew and get underneath it.

She doesn’t even want attention or cuddles when she gets through! She’s happy to get petted, but mostly wants to go back to napping on a soft surface.

Trouble is, it can’t just be any soft surface. It has to be Where The People Are.

Brought her home on Monday night. As of Wednesday, I was holding the fluff up to look over the barricade, and he was growling a little at the horrifying intruder. But not freaking out and bolting the way he does with strange humans! Which was promising.

Wednesday night, both of them were curious about what was on the other side of the barricade…

So I let Fiddles come through for a visit.

It lasted about 30 seconds. Fluff didn’t bolt, which was sort of unexpected, but he hunched up and backed away and made this very sad keening noise. Totally unfazed Fiddlesticks barely looked at him before wandering past. When she got between him and his escape route, I figured it was time to pick her up and move her out of the room.

(You wouldn’t know it from how calmly she sits, but this little lady becomes a flailing mess if you pick her up. Whatever she was sitting on — laundry, towel, carpet — it’s coming up after her, because she grabs it with all the claws.)

The fluff is getting extremely spoiled through all of this. Every time he bravely survives an interaction with the Intruder Cat, he gets treats.

Thursday night, I held him up for a viewing, and he didn’t growl at all…so I let Fiddlesticks out again, and the two of them spent a good half-hour in the same room.

Fiddles parked herself on a soft blanket and didn’t move. After about 15 minutes of this, Fluff decided it was an acceptable risk.

As of Friday, the barricade is mostly dismantled, so Fiddles can go in and out of the kitchen freely.

Fluff gets shut in the bedroom overnight. Turns out he prefers to stay there during the morning/afternoon, so I leave the door closed — mostly to keep Fiddles from bothering him.

(If she’s allowed in, they won’t fight or anything…but she will help herself to his expensive prescription food. And avail herself of his box.)

The kitty fountain is in the living room, and so far they’re managing to share that nicely.

…Fiddles also discovered a fresher source of water in the next room.

Doors get opened during the evening/night, the cats can mingle freely, and I keep an eye out to monitor anything that goes wrong. So far, peaceful coexistence is happening!

By which I mean, lots of wary curiosity from the fluff, and lots of total indifference from Fiddles. If she’s walking past him, once in a while she’ll slow down for a sniff, but that’s about it.

…What I really need is a door that the fluff can go through, but Fiddlesticks can’t. A nice boundary around his food and his safe spaces that automatically enforces itself, so he doesn’t have to.

Unfortunately, I think the only way to manage that involves special cat doors that take signals from collars. And installing one of those is…outside the scope of my lease.

But so far? This is working out okay.

Stuff about stuff that’s been up.

Family vac[cin]ations

My parents and brother came to town, making it the first time we’ve all been in one place for almost 2 years. (Parents have been vaccinated for a while, and they visited earlier in 2021. Brother is (a) young, (b) low-risk, and (c) not in a customer-facing position, so he only skated over the “2 weeks since second dose” theshhold just in time to get here.)

We visited a bunch of the local relatives. On one side, the grandparents who flatly refused to entertain unvaccinated visitors (so everyone’s had their shots). On the other, the grandparents who got their own shots as soon as possible, but were having unmasked indoor visits with my virulently antivaxxer aunt and her kids right up until they — the grandparents — tested positive.

Grandfather, who’d only had his first shot, got pretty sick and was hospitalized, but pulled through. Grandmother, who’d had both shots, barely got the sniffles, wouldn’t even have thought of getting tested if she didn’t live in the same house as a seriously-ill person. Aunt has only doubled down on how these fraudulent vaccines don’t even do anything, you guys.

I, uh, timed my part of the visit to not encounter the antivaxxer aunt.

Banging and drilling

A few relatives came over to my apartment to do some handiwork projects. Which meant the Fluff had his space invaded by Horrible Strangers, who talked and hammered and drilled and vacuumed and generally made Horrible Noises.

This cat was not a happy camper.

Normally he hides under the daybed, crouched on top of the boxes I keep under there. This time, he managed to shove one of the boxes away from the wall, so he could squeeze himself in behind it. Note, these are the boxes with the Leif & Thorn books in them — they’re heavy.

It took a solid 2 hours after the Horrible Strangers left before the fluff poked his nose out of his hiding spot. And then he went back under. It was a few more hours, and a few more exploratory peeks, before he was walking around the place like normal again.

Poor guy. He’s had such a nice year, and now this.

Black Widow (no specific spoilers)

Family had a bunch of Potential Outings planned, but the only one we actually did was seeing Black Widow on the big screen.

The building had small groups of other patrons; our theater was flat-out empty except for us. (So if you tentatively want to catch a movie but are worried about large groups in enclosed spaces…give it a shot.)

The movie was good! Mostly takes place during the period when Natasha was on the run after Civil War, gives her a solo adventure that fleshes out her backstory — both parts we knew about, and parts that are new. Funny, heartwarming when it wanted to be, makes good use of that Disney “sure, blow up all the cars you want” money.

I’m usually more into the magic and sci-fi sides of the MCU, and this was a Cap-style action-spy-thriller, no super-science beyond what you can use for “excuses to do cooler stunts.” So it wasn’t an instant favorite the way Captain Marvel was.

But it was good at what it wanted to be. It wasn’t a perfunctory “I want to support the general idea of more female superheroes getting their own solo movies” thing. It was fun, and I liked it. Marvel did good.

Speaking of Marvel:

Loki (also no specific spoilers)

The whole 6-episode series is out now, and I…

…didn’t…like it?

Which is wild, because it has all the ingredients for a thing I should like. Magic! Sci-fi! Time travel nonsense! Alternate versions of the same character having to deal with each other! Significant chunks of action on alien planets! Major queer and/or female characters! Shapeshifters! Quippy banter! Sassy, petty villain getting dragged kicking and screaming into a redemption arc!

The first episode sure felt like it was going to deliver on all those things in a way I enjoyed. And then every subsequent cliffhanger was like “okay…there were a couple specific scenes that are fun, but…is this going anywhere? This big moment should’ve been good, but why didn’t it have buildup? That dramatic setup we did get, why hasn’t it had any payoff? This weird bit, I can think of some in-universe reasons why it was weird, so is it setting up one of those, or is it just sloppy writing?”

And the answer was always “it’s just sloppy writing.”

…to be fair, I think sometimes the answer was COVID. There were scenes where you could see “none of the actors except the 2 leads are getting within 6 feet of each other, and it’s really restricting what the narrative can do.”

But that doesn’t explain all of it.

Feels like it should’ve been a full-length season. Make it a procedural, have Loki and company facing a Time Shenanigans case-of-the-week, and have the characters/relationships develop slowly over each case. Then at the end we get a multi-episode arc where the plot is all interconnected, the developments all come to a head, the status quo gets flipped over.

Instead we got pieces of that arc without any connective tissue. You get prickly suspicious characters skipping from “tense, mistrustful opponents” to “tentative admissions of Friendship” when they’ve only known each other for, what, a few days? With no tangible reason for their feelings to change. It’s just “this is the part of the story where that happens, so it’s happened.”

Ugh. It could’ve been so good! And it just…wasn’t.

…and speaking of “things I just finished that didn’t have connective tissue”:

Check, Please!

The famous, award-winning, funding-record-making, m/m webcomic? That I didn’t read during the whole length of its run. Finally picked up the print volumes when I saw them at the library, and that’s how I got through the whole thing.

It was really thin. Cute and fluffy and disjointed. Kept setting up potential conflicts, but then skimming right over them.

I flipped back through some fail_fandomanon threads from when the updates were being released live, and it was a recurring theme for new readers to go “wait, was this just…resolved offscreen? Or did I accidentally skip a page?” (I was reading a physical book and would occasionally wonder if it skipped a page. It never did.)

…unsurprisingly, the author was in Hockey RPF fandom, and a lot of fans were bringing their interests from Hockey RPF fandom. So you would have character show up in the background, and readers would be like “aha, I can tell this is an expy of Real Player X, I enjoy him because I’m transferring my fannish feelings about Real Player X onto him.” Then they’d still be invested even if he only appeared 2-3 times and never did anything significant in-universe.

Reading it over the course of a couple afternoons — and with zero personal background in who these IRL hockey players are — was a breezy experience.

But, wow, I totally get why it was so intense and frustrating for so many people reading it in realtime. It would’ve been a constant cycle of “sets you up for something interesting, keeps you on the hook for a week or a month or several months for the next update, dashes your hopes when the setup gets deflated or sidestepped or offscreen-resolved, but hey, now there’s setup for another something interesting, maybe if I just wait for the next update in a week or a month or–“

It did work well enough for enough readers to bring the author buckets of money, though. And she delivered a complete series by the end — everyone who backed a Kickstarter to get a book, got a book — which is more than you can say for a lot of webcomickers who’ve taken people’s money. As many faults as I could pick apart in the writing: you go rake in that cash, girl.

Okay, to end this on a brighter note:

Leverage: Redemption

Sequel to the original TV series. Not a reboot, a retcon, or a reimagining — just “it’s been a decade in-universe, let’s pick back up with these characters and see how they’re doing now.”

And, wow. It’s the rare follow-up that’s so well-done, and so worth it.

The first 8 episodes are streaming free (at least in the US). The cases-of-the-week have the same “yeah, we didn’t fix the system, but we gave a complicated and satisfying comeuppance to this one exploitative scumbag” vibe of Leverage Classic. There are bits that make it clear it’s set in the 2020s — a Big Pharma creep who took CARES Act money, a reference to a politician who sounds like an AOC expy, that kind of thing — but it’s not “chasing the trending headline” in a way that’ll make it feel dated and irrelevant too fast.

They killed off Nate (his actor has sexual-assault accusations, makes sense not to employ the guy), and the other characters miss him in a way that’s present without taking over the show. Brought Sophie/Parker/Eliot back together. I assume Hardison’s actor has a job with a better-paying show, because he guest-starred briefly to establish that he’s still around, then brought in his also-genius-hacker kid-sister replacement on the team.

They also picked up a not-quite-Nate-replacement — he’s a newbie but learning the ropes fast, and he can fill the role any time they need a clean-cut business-savvy white guy.

After Elliot’s actor did a stint on the crew in The Librarians, it’s delightful to me that Flynn’s actor is the new guy on the Leverage crew. Please let the creators find an excuse to cameo Eve, Exekiel, and Cassandra in the next half of the series. That would be crossover catnip.