humanist + humorist

Shifting books at the library the other day, I found a used condom (not a fresh one, either) stashed behind a shelf of J.D. Salinger, so that’s how my week is going!

(Honestly disappointed. If it had been a few bays earlier it would’ve been with the Ayn Rand, which would make a much better joke.)

(This is all in service of a big shifting/condensing project I’m doing with a bunch of 20th century authors. Books on 21st-century authors have been crammed into just one aisle, it keeps filling up and needing to be pared down — all the while there’s space on the aisles downwind, where nobody feels pressured to weed those, even though we definitely don’t need to still have 3 copies of a Salinger biography from 1992.)

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Nobly resisting the urge to download + start wasting time with a new stupid phone game.

Not sure if I’ve written about this before — my laundry place has an app, and the app has Sponsor Tie-In Offers, where if you reach (let’s say) levels 20, 50, and 100 of Ball Sort Puzzle, you get 5 cents, 13 cents, and 32 cents of credit in your laundry account. I haven’t added IRL cash to the account since this program started.

All this wouldn’t be worth doing if the games were a chore, but they’re engineered to be tiny little dopamine factories. You get a never-ending succession of Tasks, complicated enough to keep your attention, short enough that you’re getting steady hits to the Task Completed! part of your brain. The whole laundry tie-in is really useful for me, because “there is no more laundry credit to be earned from this game” is a built-in threshold for “okay, time to stop playing and delete the app now.”

So I’m currently between games, and missing those dopamine hits. But I know from experience that “oh, I’ll just play five levels, then go back to focusing on comics for a few hours” is a no-go. Like Odysseus needing to be tied to the mast to keep himself from following the Sirens, I need to not have a game app installed to keep myself from opening it.

You gotta set yourself up for success.

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Had to bail on Yuletide this year. I gave myself too many end-of-year deadlines to hit, something had to go. (The others are mostly Leif & Thorn stuff — today’s goal is to knock out another round of Volume 7 editing + bonus art.)

At least I did it at the start of the month, instead of denying the problem until the last minute, so my recip won’t be stuck with “a pinch hit that somebody only had a week to write”!

I do have the prompt set open in another tab, in the hopes that I’ll have time/energy to write somebody a quick treat before the collection goes live. It…does not seem likely. But, again, setting up for success, just in case.

Got a pack of new cloth face masks on Etsy, figured I would give them a shoutout.

The shop is LochNessLocker, they have hundreds of beautiful patterns, the size is adjustable and the fit is great. (There’s a long note with more details about the manufacturing, for anyone with specific concerns.) I ordered 4, they sent me 6 — and they clearly paid attention to my taste in the original order, because the bonus masks were also styles I would’ve picked.

I was wearing this one at work the other day, and a random teenage patron straight-up stopped me to compliment it:

The number of people still masking in public in 2024 is depressingly low — and, look, if all you have is cheap medical masks, I get it. They’re ugly, they’re not reuseable, you wear them once and look like you live in a hospital and then they’re off to pile up in the landfill.

But there are so many nicer options out there! These are comfortable, they look good, they can coordinate with your outfits, you can throw them in the wash and keep wearing them for years. Any time you want to freshen up your anti-viral wardrobe, give this shop a look.

Check it out, Cleveland Public Library just released a time-lapse video of the new-shelf-building project that’s been happening on the upper floors for the past several months.

For fun, guess how much new length (in linear feet) this added to our shelf-space capacity…then open the video description and see how close you got.

My phone has been regularly harassing me for the past month or so to free up more storage space, then eating it right back up again. Not with anything you could easily troubleshoot, either. Last week I deleted the Instagram app — the section of internal storage space labeled “Apps” went down by about 3 GB — and the section labeled “other” went up by almost 3 GB.

(Note that Instagram was already supposed to be running off an SD card! Don’t know why it was squatting on 10% of the main storage space in the first place.)

Welp, last night the thing went mostly-unresponsive. (Had to PM a friend to call out of work on my behalf.) A local tech finally convinced it to reboot, and I finally admitted that I couldn’t keep procrastinating on doing a full wipe-and-reinstall.

Even with a lot of apps/settings backed up and restored automatically, handling the rest took most of the morning.

On the plus side, can’t argue with the results:

Would you look at that. I’m sure the new number for “Apps” is misleadingly small because I haven’t installed/used anything yet, but “System” went down to half its size! Almost 9 GB of cruft wiped clean.

Sure would be nice if the software could figure out how to do that on its own. Or at least have a button I could press for it, instead of hitting “clear cache” half a dozen times every 3 days to free up a few hundred MB, you know?

A lot of apps I just re-downloaded same as I had them before, but I’m trying the nice lightweight Feedly Social Reader as an all-in-one alternative for browsing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Maybe even more platforms, if those all work out. We’ll see.

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.