We had a tiny basement and a small single room upstaira, both were mostly used as storage (and laundry for the basement). Our boy would spend most of his time hanging out with us, but sometimes he would go upstairs or downstairs just to yell his lungs out. Even though he was typically very affectionate, if I came to check on him he’d act kind of aggravated and run off, like you’re not supposed to be here, gimme my space. Okay little man. I really don’t know what that was about.

One night I was drifting off and my wife woke me saying “Did you hear that?” I said “No, what was it?” and she said “it souded like he screamed upstairs” and being a loving husband and cat dad I said “he always screams” and fell right back asleep. The next morning he had a mild limp so yeah, he fell off the rail edge partway down the stairs. I’m glad he healed up quick because this story would be a lot less funny to me.

I have never played Mario 64 outside of a couple five-minute sessions on a Toys-R-Us demo when I was maybe 10, but the Watch for Rolling Rocks half-A-press video - a speedrun with the added condition that a longer time will trump a shorter time if the player presses ‘A’ (jump) less than in the faster run - is almost unquestionably my favorite youtube video ever. It’s a hilariously silly niche thing, but beyond that it’s like watching someone try to explain their doctoral dissertation, making their best attempt while knowing full-well both that they won’t be able to get their audience to follow every piece and also that no one else is as engaged in the topic as they are. As long aa I don’t feel like a captive audience, I can find a real joy in exposure to that sort of enthusiasm. Laying that on top of something that’s just a little funny hits the spot for me so much.

Now, you’re probably wondering what I’m gonna need all this speed for. After all, I do build up speed for twelve hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes, and if you thought my other tangents were complicated, just you wait. Okay, so Mario’s position is a floating point number, but it’s converted to a short when the game uses it to test for collision with floor triangles…

I felt like I had to double up because she was already late on vaccines and it was very unlikely I’d have another opportunity soon to get her to the vet.

Knew we were moving months in advance so about six months before the move I was trying to get her comfortable going in the cage by giving her wet food in there. I thought after a couple months I would try shutting the door quietly and opening it right back up and then gradually get her used to the door being closed for longer durations, but the very first time she was very unhappy and the next couple months she basically said fuck you I’m eating the dry food in protest right in front of you when you’re doing this. When she finally started going back in I felt like I can’t play with getting her accustomed again, I’ve got to just do it on the day, and I was pretty confident that if I didn’t get her vaccines then it would be a very long time.

Our little lady had some trauma in her youth and was extremely resistant to being picked up and would absolutly not take direction to go into a crate. After a few years of her getting more comfortable I knew I could probably get her in again one time by tricking her, but I should save that for an emergency and nothing else. Eventually that was needed when we had to move. Of course, knowing I had to make the most of that I scheduled a vet appointment for that day.

It was somehow much worse than I had anticipated, starting as soon as I shut her in. She was so scared, throwing her full body with as much force as she could against the walls of the crate over and over and over, keeping that up while I was carrying her to the car and the first few minutes of the drive before she finally started to calm down. Watching that shook me, emotionally painful and just building anxiety about the appointment.

She actually was very submissive for the vet, who seemed to think I was crazy because at that point I was visibly a lot more terrified and upset than the cat.

Awful day in general, I have never seen an animal more depressed than she was after finishing that appointment and getting to the new place, it was horrific. She was normally extremely skittish about potentially being touched, but would invite pets sometimes. In that first day though, she was just do whatever you want I don’t care. I had to pick her up body basically limp out of the crate, she had never let me pick her up. She didn’t move from where I had placed her for hours, zero reaction to any action from me. She got back to her old self after a few weeks, but that day is still very painful to think back to I feel like I’m about to cry just from writing this.

I think we can all agree that Trump should respond to this baseless libel by unsealing every inch of dirt he has on Elon.

I too was naïve enough to think that since my girl was shy around people I needed to solve that by getting her a companion. I wasn’t aware growling was something cats did until making that mistake. It’s especially weird because I don’t think I ever heard her hiss. Her growl was very intimidating to me, but not to the kitten. Okay little man, I’m not sure she wants to play today.

I think she was mad about that decision for a long time.

And an AOC candidacy would really, really excite me if I didn’t know that Democrats rig their primaries.

Yeah at this point I think you could take a person from my own life that I have literal love and respect for and I would still be more inclined to interpret surviving a primary as a character indictment than as reason for optimism.

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.

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.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with “Proud New Dad” and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

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.

The last one got me. The ones before were just mildly amusing.

I don’t think this is true. If we’re talking about enthusiastic democratic voters then I’m not gonna argue, but I think the vast majority of democratic voters are reluctant. It’s mostly a body of overworked and exploited people who are coping with their lack of political autonomy by setting aside a bit of time on election days to cast a vote against what they have concluded is the greater evil. It’s reasonable to critique that, but it’s much more demoralization than it is stupidity.

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.

Yeah I don’t have an answer for the thing you’re actually asking (sorry) but this is 100% a reasonable take and honestly I fully approve of their approach here. Strawberry is licensed under the GPL, it is libre software and can be packaged in any FOSS operating system without issue. This adds to the free software community. They are explicitly only selling to people who don’t value free software enough to use a free operating system.

And to be clear, I can guarantee that no one loses sleep over piracy of their GPL software, otherwise it wouldn’t be GPL. I see it more as a way for the devs to wash their hands of troubleshooting for operating systems they don’t want to care about - anyone on windows/mac who cares enough about strawberry to pay gets listened to, but otherwise you’ve created an easy excuse for ignoring the extra work.

As an aside it’s my preferred player on linux, good software.