Andro Butch Ninja

Which is a sign of domestication, btw. And why you should keep them inside.

Which is good, because both bear and puma have no problem eating housecat, and habituated bears at least have been known to specialize in eating feral and outdoor cats. (Consider the case of the speed at which outdoor cats vanished as a consequence of habituated bear population swells in Grafton, NH, during that city's well documented black bear problem.) One sample of stomach contents from recolonizing pumas in the Dakotas contained no domestic livestock, but there sure were domestic cats in those stomach contents.

House cats are not apex predators. They are actually a pretty low effort source of protein for a wild animal like a cougar or a bear because often, especially for pet or young cats, they have relatively little in the way of survival skills and they are artificially numerous (feeding feral or outdoor cats can spike local populations, as can owners of pet or barn cats kept with outdoor access "restocking" the area as cats die or vanish by acquiring new cats).

The very safest thing a housecat can do if faced with a bear or cougar is hide. An inexperienced cat who believes itself safe might treat a cougar as a huge conspecific, but that's a fast way to becoming a tasty snack. Cats are social, however, and it's true that humans solve a lot of their problems, so yelling to notify a human is a pretty good safety strategy if the cat is safely inside. Otherwise... not so much.

Me, nervously: Well… I’ve been trying to treat myself like a nervous cat…

therapist, stifling a goodnatured laugh: Oh? can you explain that to me?

Me: Well… if you have a nervous cat, the first thing you do is make sure their environment is safe and remove stressors… and you make sure they have enough food and water and places to hide… and you provide some enrichment in case they need to work out energy…

Therapist: And how are you applying that to yourself?

Me: Um. If I feel anxious, I’ll see if I need to back out of any sites or conversations, enforce my boundaries… check my environment for flashing lights or painful noises… make sure I’m hydrated and have eaten… and work on a hobby

online doctors aren't legally allowed to fill controlled prescriptions

offline doctors don't like filling them unless they know you

doctors are allowed to stop seeing walk in patients any time

walk in patients who get cut off from one source all flood to another

none of these doctors are legally accountable for throwing patients on their ass

I don't have anyone to fill my goddamn prescription

brain starts working at 35% capacity the second I run out of medicine

legally allowed to fill

controlled prescriptions

Hey everyone,

It's Your Local Bardic entity, Gallus Rostromengalus of Bread Jesus and other Weird Tumblr Story Fame.

Despite my best efforts to mitigate mt Terrible English Dental DNA, today two of my teeth broke.

I don't even have a fun story about this, it's literally terrible genetics and stress-grinding my teeth in my sleep.

I just got back from emergency surgery to get the pieces pulled and the hole in my jaw closed so I don't get an infection, but a second reconstruction surgery to give me a bone graft and dental implants will be needed so I can actually chew and use my mouth for it's intended purposes.

I do not currently have dental insurance. I haven't talked about it here much, but my husband was unemployed after getting laid off for almost all of last year. He has a job again, but it pays like 2/3rds of his previous one and the benefits are crap. Like no dental insurance until he's worked there at least a year.

So I'm on the hook for the full cost of Today's emergency surgery, Medication, and the necessary follow-up reconstruction, which my dentist estimates will cost between $5000-$7000. Our dentist has given us every discount she can and we have a payment plan, but losing half our household income has left us with no savings and credit cards at their limits. Even though I only need to come up with $500 this month to go ahead with the reconstructive surgery, I do not have any money to spare. It will also be VASTLY cheaper overall to pay for everything up front rather than pay interest over the months with the payment plan, but literally anything will help me right now.

Link To My GoFundMe

Link To My Ko-Fi

Thank you all so much, Gallus

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)

Mooooooood

Someone in a weaving discord I'm in saw this much-jpg'd image on Facebook. They enjoyed it and crossposted it. I enjoyed it and asked if there was a source. Alas, unattributed. We would never know.

Not so! By their magical librarianship and citation-hunting powers, @ginneke tracked the image first to Pinterest, then a long-defunct blog, then a connection with the 1960s fairytale retellings of Amadel Williams-Ellis illustrated by one William Stobbs. He had the correct whimsical art style - a hit! Another server member suggested a likely candidate tale of Baba Yaga involving a cat and a loom.

Unfortunately, these books have never been digitised, not even the tables of contents, so there was no way to know whether they might be correct. And my various libraries had never heard of the books. However, for about £7 each on ebay they were within my shenanigans budget - I was invested now.

I ordered two, mostly at random. Leafed all the way through both of them, got nearly to the end with some delightful other creatures but not yet the Loom Cat...

..... and then all of a sudden there it was! In a Baba Yaga story in Round a the World Fairy Tales exactly as predicted! Success in tracking down an 80-year-old untitled children's book illustration via several people and much joy. I'm very satisfied and will put the full Baba Yaga tale in a reblog.

-

And as an aside, because apparently it needs to be said. FREE THE NIPPLE is about being topless in public, bare chested, nips out... It does not mean going braless. By all means go braless, you should rightly say "this is sexual harassment" to anyone who tries to make you wear one.