Things have been so hard lately. I appreciate you reading. Thank you.

I login to lemmy often enough that I would notice. Lemmy grew a lot overnight the last time reddit pissed off a lot of their userbase with one decision. There’s good and bad to that, it was nice to see this place grow, but it became much less friendly when redditors flocked here. I’d expect more of that.

Oh my fucking god. Everyone suggesting he only did this to raise his profile for a presidential run has got to be feeling pretty silly about their lack of cynicism right now. I know I do.

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’m assuming there is no existing audio of the guy speaking out against civil rights while taking a dump? Or at least a transcription of that specific part of his speech so we can imagine at home? It seems like an emblematic moment in American history.

There’s a throwaway line that one of the Bobs says talking with management about the layoffs where he starts with “well just a second there professor” and it’s one I never hear quoted but for some reason that phrase gets me every time I watch it.

It took growing up to get it, but I love the scene where the peasant is explaining to King Arthur that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a terrible basis for a system of governance.

Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.

The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it’s grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it’s missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.

Yes, I actually do interpret it that way even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never received it with that intent. Then I think “why am I like this?” and wonder if this is part of getting old. This is actually much less of a joke than it probably sounds like.

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:

Maybe it’s possible that there are many people who are not on the fediverse today for reasons similar to why you weren’t two years ago. Not that much has changed since then (other than, possibly, your own understanding).

When did you begin using the fediverse? I didn’t stop being lazy until I joined diaspora in 2011.

I feel like “Once” is the album where filler tracks started creeping into Nightwish, but “Ghost Love Score” is the Nightwish song. It’s spectacular.

Man I thought Without Face was a band lost to time. I love the song “Weird Places”.

Sandra Nasić of the Guano Apes for her appearance on Apocalyptica’s Path Vol. 2.

This song came to mind for me too. Cult is Apocalyptica’s best album, but that song basically ruined my ability to enjoy it as it was made because putting it on straight-up I’m immediately disappointed by the lack of vocals in track 1.

There was another track from that album that they reworked to add a guest vocalist to, I think track 8, but that one didn’t hit me as an improvement over the original.

After my teenage years it’s been very rare for me to dig into a band deeply enough to learn anything about their members, so the easiest examples are all going to be women doing clean vocals, which is the one time you can (usually) explicitly tell the difference just by listening. Some of my favorite examples are Liv Kristine’s work in Theatre of Tragedy, Tarja-era Nightwish, the first Stolen Babies album, and Sirenia’s first two albums along with all of Tristania’s discography pre-Rubicon.

I have two examples that immediately come to mind outside clean vocals:

Samantha Escarbe is the guitarist for Virgin Black and my understanding is she essentially splits the songwriting load with Rowan London. The Requiem stuff I still need to give more listens, but I think the first two albums are absolutely spectacular music. In “Museum of Iscariot” she does one of my favorite guitar solos I’ve ever heard.

Angela Gossow’s vocals on Arch Enemy’s “Wages of Sin” album are some of the absolute best in metal. I live for that shit. I never really got into anything else Arch Enemy did though.

At some point about a decade ago I realized I’m much happier just paying the extra $8 every couple months when I go to get a haircut and otherwise just letting it grow out.

Yeah, I wasn’t considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I’ve stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.

I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it’s the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.

Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don’t understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.

I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don’t know any other player that has similar.

I never knew there was a name for this idea! I came up with a silly science fiction idea based on this a few years ago.