The best kind of dumb

Mermaid and Dragon Tights with handmade silicone scales by tinkercast on Etsy

It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.

The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.

It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.

The like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.

They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.

They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.

It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.

Ok, well, really they only have 3 different The Mask Animated Series tapes, but why do they have so many copies? Who donated these and why did they have them? Oh, fuck, now I have a lot of Mask tapes…

69 Mask tapes to be exact. They were all unopened. I don’t even have a VCR. Even if I did, I wouldn’t need to buy every copy they had. Why did I do this? Well, let’s get them out and play with them…

This is not very much fun.

Every tape comes with the most incredible coupon. Some tapes actually came with two, so thank you very much, packaging errors. 

The true bummer here is that these coupons expired 20 years ago. The $3 refund does not appear to be worth the effort and I wonder if anyone ever bothered. You had to buy 4 Totino’s pizzas, pizza rolls, or hearty pockets between 10/24/95 and 5/31/96, include the upc from the packages, the receipts from when you purchased those awful food products with the awful food products circled, this coupon, the proof of purchase tab from the Mask box and the receipt from when you purchased the tape during the previously mentioned dates. If anyone did this for $3, I would like to hear from you. Print out this post, take a picture of you eating the printout instead of a Totino’s party pizza, pizza rolls, or hearty pocket, and email it to me with a short story describing how you spent your hard earned $3. Anyway, I guess I’ll epoxy the tapes together and start coating them in resin.

Yes, and do something with those stupid coupons.

TOTINO’S PIZZA ROLLS SMMOKIN’! Now do it several times.

I can’t just throw away the boxes either. That would be terribly wasteful.

Surprisingly, I had more than enough tapes to do what I wanted to do, but the boxes came up short, so the other side of this had to be a little different. 

I suppose this is good, because one day I might want to know what I’m missing out on, having ruined nearly all of the precious tapes. I can just look at this side and read what the episodes were about. I think I watched some of this cartoon when I was a kid. I fucking loved the movie when it came out, so I’m pretty sure I watched this show. Anyway, what’s next?

Oh. I guess I’m really bad at taking pictures of the process. It’s a bookcase. There was only one tape I didn’t have to open.

Maybe I’ll get a VCR one day so I can watch this tape.

There’s just one more thing.

Bookcases are usually just so damn boring.