Like a pear cider that's made from 100% pears

Adopting this breed from a rescue is a good deed, but they will have higher than average medical needs. Be sure to do your research to determine if you are financially and emotionally able to care for one before adopting.

Thank you for giving me the chance to say what I am going to say.

These cats are not something we should be bringing into the world on purpose.

Please don't create demand for them.

If you want a soggy muppet, and can handle the expense and the possible heartbreak, you absolutely can find Persians and Himalayans in shelters and rescues, and they need homes desperately.

Just be ready. I wish it was different, I truly do, but you cannot adopt a cat from a Problems Disorder breed without accepting that they will, in fact, have Problems.

I was in the trenches with one for fourteen years.

I needed something damp that would sneeze into my mouth, so I got this alleged cat from a shelter when he was just under a year old. Here he is at ~13.

Dried Pickle Man.

Nothing about his skull was put together right. Even his ears were uneven. If I'm being honest, the rest of him wasn't so great, either.

Here's a list of the breed-related problems I knew about.

Wry nose/mouth. Very common in brachycephalic breeds, which are also prone to cleft palates.

Breathing problems when he got excited or slept on his back.

Chronic sinus infections and URIs.

Tooth problems. His mouth was so jacked up.

Eye and tear duct problems.

Hyperesthesia, which made grooming painful. We sedated and shaved him twice a year, and in between I trimmed mats myself.

IBD. Strongly associated with intestinal lymphoma.

Bladder crystals and bladder stones. Painful. Expensive. Can absolutely kill them. He had both.

CKD. Kidney disease. All cats are at high risk for this. Since it is a dominant gene, Persians and Himalayans, with their, um, ergonomic family trees, are even more at risk for it, and it is hard to catch early. There is no cure. To manage just this, we did bloodwork at least three times a year. He needed regular urinalysis, prescription food, medications, and sometimes subcutaneous fluids. Three times he started to spiral downhill. Three times some of the best vets in the country pulled him back. The fourth time, they couldn't.

Y'all, this was just one cat. Their genetic code can fit so many other problems inside it.

This backyard-bred bog haint averaged around $200-$250 a month just in routine care and food. For most of his life we were never below $3,000 in vet debt.

My god, I loved him, my stinky son with Every Disease. Can you understand? That I loved him?

The night before we were going to help him along, he drifted peacefully into the Bog Eternal while in bed with us, after snackies. We did everything we possibly could for him before he went. His quality of life was good, we didn't keep him longer than was best for him. It just took an incredible amount of effort, money, and love to keep it kind to him. The love, at least, was easy, but it hurt the most.

I knew exactly what I was signing up for before I adopted him. I thought harder about that decision than I'd thought about any adoption before or since. Could I handle it?

I decided yes. And by the skin of my teeth and the grace of his tusk, I did. I did.

I have never regretted adopting him.

while we're at it, Scottish Folds (the floppy eared cats) have a painful cartilage disorder that makes them develop arthritis while they're still kittens, and Lykoi (werewolf cats) develop gruesome and painful cystic acne because of their coats. Manx cats (the ones with no tails) can have spina bifida and incontinence related problems because of their short spines. Munchkins (short leg cats) have a form of dwarfism that causes problems with their spines and joints.

They later found what they presumed to be the dad, and I fostered him as well. His fur was so matted we had to shave off all of it, and he had near constant tear tracks under his eyes.

They were very sweet (the dad took a little time, he clearly hadn't had good experiences with humans, but he came around eventually), but definitely had health problems that most cats don't.

The Cudgel

A law that the largest companies in the world already comply with, and that hundreds of small projects cannot comply with, is not a child safety law. It is a compliance moat. It raises the regulatory cost of providing an operating system just enough that only well-resourced corporations can afford to do it.

And:

the law is not about protecting children. It is about building compliance infrastructure.

Also:

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

OP also invented armsocks.