laughing plastic

[Cyber Effect] astonishing modern raden (mother of pearl inlay) by Terumasa Ikeda. A nice pun on the classic Ghost in the shell ;)

Raden is a very old decorative craft (see video below), usually used on lacquer bases with floral or traditional motifs. It’s so great to see it used this way!

Ooey gooey sock set by Andrea Mowry started May 11th and finished May 25th! 💜💚

actually adding my tags. ik op also talked about Stormé in the notes but like. i really do find it so frustrating how he has been completely neglected as a historical figure. to the point where there's a lot of people who will, when talking about the erasure of Black trans people from Stonewall history, will immediately jump to talking about Marsha P. Johnson (who, while a vital figure in US queer history who deserves the attention she has started to receive from the community, did not start the uprising and arrived to them later) and continue to credit her with "throwing the first shotglass." but they don't even know who Stormé is, despite again, it being at the very least equally if not more likely she was actually involved with sparking the uprising.

and its even more frustrating because part of the reason its likely isn't just Stormé's own recollection, but because there are other reports that the uprising was kicked off when the cops arrested, specifically, a person seen as female who was wearing male clothing and was being violently arrested for FTM crossdressing. FTM activists were trying to raise awareness about this in 1989. like people specifically saw (even if it wasn't Stormé) a butch dyke getting arrested explicitly for wearing too many men's clothes and not enough women's clothes.

and yet, no one ever. fucking talks about this. no one who specifically is trying to talk about the erasure of trans people from queer activism mentions this. and we should all be asking, ourselves and each other, why? a lot of people don't want to have this conversation because it asks a lot of us, but that's exactly why its so vital to have responsibly.

Stonewall is as much myth as it is historical event, especially at this point in time. and how we choose to narrate it matters, even though we (should) all know that we will never know the full exact story, nor do we need to because, again, much of its importance is serving as a grounded myth of the birth of organized queer resistance in the US. And the fact is, there is every reason for us to tell a version of this myth which highlights that the inciting moment for queer people being fucking done with the constant acts of violence, was a mixed Black transmasc woman, a drag king who identified as a transgender warrior in Leslie Feinberg's book of that name, being violently arrested for his transmasculine presentation.

and not only is that not the version we tell, there's often no trace of transmasculinity at all in how we remember Stonewall or any queer historical events. & op is so. so incredibly right in prompting people to critically examine that absence. because i do believe if Stormé was a femme lesbian, people would be a lot more invested in making sure people know about the lesbian woman who started Stonewall. almost like, on an unconscious collective level, we see transmasculine figures as undesirable when it comes to being community icons, martyrs, heroes, theorists, creatives, etc.

anyways, for those curious, here's Stormé's recollection of Stonewall, from this interview:

The conversation turned to the night in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn where she made history. Quite a few friends, writers and historians over the years have identified her as the tough cross-dressing butch lesbian who was clubbed by the NYPD, which evoked enough indignation and anger to spur the crowd to action. She was identified as the Stonewall Lesbian in Charles Kaiser’s book The Gay Metropolis, and her scuffle with the police has been mentioned a few times in passing by The New York Times in the past couple of decades. Then in the January 2008 issue of Curve Magazine she identified herself as the Stonewall Lesbian in a detailed interview with writer Patrick Hinds, an excerpt of which is below: I asked her if she still remembered that night. She answered in the affirmative. After the cop hit her on the head, she socked him with her fist. “I hit him,” she said. “He was bleeding.” A natural protector, she has worked as a security guard at a few of the lesbian bars in the city. I spoke to her friend, Lisa Cannistraci, who has known her for around 25 years. Now one of the owners of lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, Cannistraci said that DeLarverie worked as a security guard at the original Cubby Hole, located at 438 Hudson Street, starting in 1985. Cubby Hole eventually moved to the corner of West 4th and West 12th. Then Henrietta Hudson opened at the 438 Hudson Street location, and DeLarverie continued working there until 2005. “Until she was 85 years old?” I asked her. Cannistraci said yes.

also, just to drive home the point, the community ignoring Stormé was not a harmless act. he developed dementia later in life and did not receive the support that she fucking deserved from the community:

In March, Farrell, who lived next door to DeLarverie at the Hotel Chelsea, found DeLarverie disoriented and, uncharacteristically, asking for help. DeLarverie was shaking and dehydrated, and she was taken to and treated at the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. No next of kin has been located, and she no domestic partner. Friends say that she had a long term relationship with an aerialist and burlesque performer, but that was “a long time ago.” With no one in her life legally able to make health care decisions, she was given a court appointed a guardian: the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (“JASA”). She remained at the hospital as doctors ascertained her ability to care for herself. When St. Vincent’s went bankrupt and closed abruptly, she was transferred to the nursing home. SAGE, an advocacy group for elderly members of the LGBT community, has also been offering assistance. Her friends say that communication with the aforementioned groups has been inadequate and a source of frustration, and they feel powerless to improve her situation. [...] DeLarverie continued emceeing and singing after Stonewall — at gay events and at benefits. Her friend Williamson Henderson, President of the S.V.A., told me that she hosted an annual gay nightlife event, The Gay Bar People’s Ball, where all of the movers and shakers of NYC gay nightlife would congregate and receive awards. “It was an event that was well known and a big deal,” he said. In Sam Bassett’s film, DeLarverie said that she continued to sing at benefits for battered women and children, remarking “Somebody has to care. People say, ‘Why do you still do that?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple. If people didn’t care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being black, raised in the south.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here.'” What does the future hold for DeLarverie? Cannistraci told me that she is currently in the process of petitioning for legal guardianship of DeLarverie and hopes to move her into a brighter, more modern nursing home with a larger staff and activities for the residents — and one where a friend of DeLarverie’s already resides. “She was a protector of the community, and [her situation] is heartbreaking,” she said. [...] DeLarverie’s situation is, unfortunately, not unique, and it highlights some of the issues faced by gay and lesbian seniors. It is unclear whether DeLarverie has no surviving family members or whether she has surviving family members but simply lost touch with them over the years. Many elders become isolated from their families, either because of family disapproval or because they moved away from their families to a big city with a large gay and lesbian population, thereby becoming out of sight and out of mind. If they do end up in a retirement home or nursing home, there is also the issue of whether other residents will have a problem with their sexual orientation. Furthermore, in many states, same-sex partners cannot be legally bound, and if there is no next of kin, one can end up being a ward of the state. If the Rosa Parks of the gay community can end up in a nursing home among strangers like other forgotten elderly men and women, it is certainly a wake up call.

^^^ all of this + Gavin Grimm not only did that, but he didn't benefit basically at all. he graduated before the case was decided, and he only got $1 from it. Gavin was left traumatized and poor and has since struggled with housing. And I personally have never heard his name mentioned in discussions of vital modern trans activists in the US. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Fuck, I've barely heard his name ever, and I'm a queer from the DMV (region in the northeast USA) who has been pretty involved in my local queer community, so there's really no excuse.

You can still donate to his GoFundMe if you'd like. From this article:

As Donald Trump rolled back LGBTQ+ rights, including banning trans servicemembers from the military and authorizing homeless shelters to exclude trans people, Grimm won repeated court victories. But his school district appealed. One court of appeals judge compared Grimm to the historic American plaintiffs who challenged slavery, Japanese concentration camps, segregation and bans on interracial and gay marriage. A 2020 ruling offered a “resounding yes” in favor of the constitution and civil rights laws protecting trans students from discrimination. Grimm graduated before the case was resolved and never got to return to his school’s boys’ bathrooms. In 2021, the supreme court allowed Grimm’s victory to stand, and the school board was ordered to pay $1.3m in attorney’s fees. Grimm, however, only got a symbolic $1. To secure damages, Grimm would’ve had to give the opposition’s lawyers access to his medical records to scrutinize the cause and extent of his emotional distress, a process he couldn’t stomach after years of fighting. The idea he’d have to prove his anguish was unbelievable to his mom, who can’t shake the memories of her son becoming suicidal. Grimm doesn’t regret moving on without damages. But he desperately could’ve used financial help – especially as the trauma of his childhood began to catch up with him. [...]

while we're here, might as well add on that not only was the Stonewall Uprising likely kicked off by a transmasculine person resisting state violence because of their masculine presentation, but the transmasculine people & other queer (perceived-)women of the nearby Women's House of Detention rioted in solidarity:

"The House of D [was] 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn," Ryan says. "On the first night of the riots, people incarcerated in the prison could actually see what was happening out their windows, and they started a riot all their own, setting fire to their belongings and throwing them down to the streets below while chanting 'Gay rights! Gay rights! Gay rights!'" By the '50s and '60s, Ryan estimates, "around 75% of the people incarcerated in the House of D are queer in some way." In the 1960s, the prison began marking gay prisoners with a "D" for "degenerate," and placing them into solitary confinement because they were considered a "danger to other women."

To answer the question I keep seeing in the notes, I also do not understand why this is tagged as adult. Tumblr made the choice for me. I am currently appealing it but I have no idea how long that will take. In the meantime, if you want to share this with anyone outside tumblr, the 20dollarlolita.tumblr.com url shows the post, while the tumblr.com/20dollarlolita post will hide it for being flagged.

There's multiple kinds of buttonholes out there, but the two main categories are bound buttonholes and worked buttonholes. Worked buttonholes are made with thread, either on your sewing machine or by hand.

As someone whose job is to sell premium sewing machines, I can assure you that once you're spending $5000 on a sewing machine, you can do perfect, consistent, 1-step machine-worked buttonholes every single time*. But sewing machine that don't have a computer-feedback 1-step buttonhole often make the "consistent" component pretty difficult, which is annoying because on most projects with buttonholes, you have to make multiple, identical buttonholes.

___ *Okay that's a lie, but you can get perfect machine-worked buttonholes 90% of the time, assuming you follow the instructions and use stabilizer. Probably.

If your sewing machine doesn't have an easy, consistent buttonhole setting, you can work them by hand. I recently did a blouse entirely with hand-worked buttonholes, because I sewed an entire blouse on a 1954's Singer Featherweight, just to prove to myself that I could do it. What I learned is that hand-worked buttonholes require knowing the right technique, and also require plain ol' practicing so that they don't look ugly as heck. If you don't have time, or don't have the desire to learn hand-worked buttonholes, there's more options for machined buttonholes, even on machines without zigzag stitching.

Look at how pretty this bound buttonhole is. In a worked buttonhole, the edges of the buttonhole are secured with thread. In a bound buttonhole, the edges of the buttonhole are secured with fabric. This picture is from an article in Threads that teaches you one of the proper ways to accomplish this.

Or you can do this thing that I do, which looks pretty much the same. I think my method is easier, or maybe it's just easier for me to understand. Anyway, my coworker said it's an abomination, so now it's time for everyone to learn how to do it.

To do this, you're going to need three fabrics. One of these is going to be your garment, or whatever you're putting the buttonhole in. One is going to be your facing, and one is going to be your buttonhole binding. Some people refer to the binding as "lips" and that feels weird to me.

A note on fabric selection: if you're doing this in a fabric that is not very thick and does not stretch, you can make your facing out of the same fabric as your garment. If your fabric has stretch (my white fabric is 2% spandex and so it does stretch a little bit), you want to use the closest fabric you can find that does not stretch. If your fabric is thicker, you want to use a thinner fabric that is as close to the color of your main garment as possible. If you for some reason can't match your facing to your garment, you can match your facing to your buttonhole binding. The point on the facing is that you want it to blend in on the off chance that it does show. For this example, my facing is the alien abduction fabric. Your buttonhole binding is going to show. You can choose if you want to do a contrast binding, like I did in my tutorial, or a matching binding, like Threads did in that picture up there. Mistakes are easier to hide in a matching binding, but contrast buttonholes are more fun. You are the master of your own destiny in this case.

Place the buttonhole and the facing right sides together, on the spot where you want your buttonhole. Sew a line of stitching around the outside of your buttonhole. If you're doing multiple buttonholes, and they need to be consistent, you're going to need to figure out the best way to mark them so that they are all the same. I recommend making 2-3 buttonholes on scrap fabric just to make sure you can consistently do them all the same.

When you have your finished buttonhole, the binding will close up the space, so it's okay (and encouraged) to sew this original buttonhole box wider than you would normally sew it. You want to make your width of your box just a hair wider than the intended final size of your buttonhole, but you want the height to be much taller. If your buttonhole isn't tall enough, you won't have enough seam allowance to make a strong buttonhole. (The exception to this is doing buttonholes on fabrics that are stable when they're cut, like lycra or anti-pill fleece. I'll get to those later).

Using some sharp scissors, you're going to cut this shape into your box. If you want a square box with sharp corners (and you do), it's important to cut all the way into the corner. Don't cut the stitching, but come as close to it as you possibly can. Where these corner cuts are is going to control where your finished corners will be, so take some time and get them in a perfect square.

You can see here how I pulled my threads to the back and knotted them off. To do this, hold your bobbin threads very tightly, and use a seam ripper or a stiletto or a pin to pick up your top threads. You have to hold the bobbin threads, or else you'll just undo your stitching from the back. Once your top threads are all on the same side, you can tie them all in a knot and then trim the threads to 1/4". The tails will be hidden behind the facing when you're done, so you don't need to cut them super short. You'll also notice that I have some extra thread coming out of my lower left corner. That's because I messed things up while sewing this and broke a thread. You shouldn't have this thread coming out, unless you also messed up exactly like I did.

Push your facing through your buttonhole, and straighten it out on the other side. Press everything flat. This is a point in the process where it's really important to make everything look nice and square.

I don't have a picture for this, but when you're pressing your facing from the back, try to have a little tiny sliver of your garment fabric visible through the buttonhole. This makes sure that the facing isn't visible from the front. Also, while we're here, look closely at my picture on the right. You can see my printed facing through the fabric. This is one of the reasons why you want to match your facing to your front fabric.

Fun fact, if you want to, at this point you can just fold the facing to make the buttonhole binding. I don't like doing it this way, for several reasons, but the Reader's Digest Guide to Home Sewing says that it's a legitimate way to do these things. I don't like this because it's harder to get things lined up straight, looks worse when you're using a contrast binding, and is more likely to rip when you're actually functionally using the buttonhole. However, it's Technically More Correct than what I'm about to do.

It's time to get your fabric for your binding. As long as it's an appropriate weight, you can use pretty much anything. I have some printed gingham here. Get two pieces, slap them right sides together, baste them on your longest stitch length with a 1" (or more) seam allowance, and press the seam open from both sides.

Because I wanted my gingham pattern to be on the diagonal, I cut my pieces on the diagonal. If you want it straight, cut them straight. This is a great technique for patterns that you really want to match, because you're working with your pieces out in the open instead of trying to match them in a crunched up little space within your buttonhole. If you're doing something complex, like pattern matching a directional plaid on the bias, you can match up one single long seam, and then cut the bindings as you need, instead of having to match them over and over in little 1" sections.

Take your binding all pressed open, put it on your work space, and place your garment fabric over it, centering the box on the seam between the two pieces. You now want to secure the garment fabric onto the binding fabric, so that the two stay in place. My chosen method is to use some hand sewing needles as if they are headless pins (which of course I didn't take a picture of). This lets me flip the fabric around without my sewing machine foot running into pin heads.

Once your binding is secured, fold down your garment fabric. Do you see the little piece of garment fabric that's visible? Make sure you have that separated out, because you're about to sew on it.

Going as close to your fold as you possibly can without catching it (this is a good time for your zipper foot if you have one), you are going to sew your binding to your facing, and you are also going to sew that little trapezoid onto your binding and also your facing. I sew for an inch or so beyond the buttonhole, because it doesn't take any extra time and it does provide a little bit of extra security.

(Do not panic. I did fix my tension right after taking this picture).

You're then going to fold the garment fabric up so that you can access the same fabric trapezoid on the bottom of the buttonhole. Sew through the binding, the facing, and the little trapezoid.

Now, you're going to fold back the sides of the buttonholes, and sew the facing to the binding, making sure that you also sew through the little triangles at the sides.

Having to sew through these little bits of seam allowance is why it's important to make your box wide enough at the start of the process. With fabrics that can fray with pressure, you need at least enough fabric that the facing won't rip off the stitching. On a thinner fabric that's tightly woven, you will probably need at least 1/8" on the tops and the bottoms. On a thicker fabric that is more loosely woven, you'll need to go even wider.

So now it's time to take your whole mess on the back and trim it into something nice and neat. Pinking shears are good for this, because it decreases the chance of the patch burning through to the front. If you want to be extra precise and proper, you can trim your binding seam allowance to be shorter than your facing seam allowance, which will do extra work to make sure that your patch doesn't show up on the front.

Generally these patches are thick enough that they don't really risk flipping back around through the hole, or getting folded and crunched, but you can tack down the edges if you feel the need to.

The last step on these buttonholes is to rip out the basting seam holding the two edges of the binding together. However, just like how you don't want to cut your machine worked buttonholes until it's the point in the garment construction where you're adding the buttons, you don't want to rip the basting open until the very first time you need the buttonhole. Just trust me, everything is easier when it's all in one piece.

And there you go, you made a buttonhole on your machine and you didn't even need Presser Foot #3a

Good thing, too.

Okay, one last perk of this:

Have you ever tried to make a buttonhole on a knit? A lot of machines that do have a 1-step buttonhole give you one option for a worked buttonhole, and it doesn't really work on knits. Even the proper buttonhole for stretch fabric doesn't actually work super well. The problem is that you don't want buttonholes to stretch, or else the button will fall out, but stretch fabrics want to stretch, and they're difficult to stabilize.

Welllllll. Guess what we have the power to do.

When you go back to the step where you attach the facing into the buttonhole, you've now stabilized it on all four sides with a tightly woven fabric that won't stretch or distort. However, since the facing is pretty much only attached to the seam and the seam allowance of the buttonhole, it doesn't bunch or shift really badly, and makes some very neat-looking buttonholes. The buttonhole binding also is often a tighter woven fabric, making it easier to actually insert buttons into and to wear without damaging your buttonholes.

If you have a fabric that's very tightly assembled and doesn't fray or rip, like a 4-way stretch fabric or a polar fleece, and you need to do a buttonhole, you can actually even cheat more.

Just like before, stack your facing onto your garment, right sides together. Sew your little box, but in this case you want it to be as narrow as the physics of the fabric will actually allow. Do a couple of tests to make sure you know how much width you need to make is structurally work. Slash the box open, but you don't need to do the corners this time. Flip the facing through, iron the fuck out of it to make your buttonhole as small as possible, and then do some tacking to keep the facing where it should be. If you have enough room, you can sew the top and bottom to the facing like you did on the bound version.

You can topstitch or hand-overcast through the buttonhole to make the facing more secure. It would look like this except imagine if whoever made the buttonhole actually gave a shit. If you can't get this method to work right, oops, looks like you're going to have to do the method with the separate binding.

Do some tests, make sure you like how it looks and you like how it works.

1974 Panasonic FM Stereo Head Set RF-40

Sources:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/UW468 “How Effective and Humane Is Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) for Feral Cats?” 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6523511/ “A Case of Letting the Cat out of The Bag—Why Trap-Neuter-Return Is Not an Ethical Solution for Stray Cat (Felis catus) Management” (also has a thousand references attached that are handy)

Not a reference so much as the human society actively admitting that TNR does nothing to decrease population, actively contributes to harming wildlife, and doesn’t actually help the cats in any way, just reduces some of the nuisance behavior that people complain about: https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/real-impacts-trap-neuter-return

Unscientific from here on out as i don’t feel like trying to find the studies i read in like January of last year:

https://hahf.org/awake/the-trouble-with-trap-vaccinate-neuter-return/ “The Trouble With Trap-Neuter-Re (Abandon!) from the hillsborough animal health foundation, articles also link to studies

Animal Emergency and Referral Center of Minnesota. (2022, October 26). Indoor cats vs. outdoor cats. Animal Emergency & Referral Center of Minnesota. https://aercmn.com/indoor-cats-vs-outdoor-cats/

Campbell, V. (2017, January 25). The Obituary of the Stephens Island Wren. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/the-obituary-of-the-stephens-island-wren/

Castillo, D., & Clarke, A. L. (2003). Trap/neuter/release methods ineffective in controlling domestic cat “colonies” on public lands. Natural Areas Journal, 23(3).

Coe, S. T., Elmore, J. A., Elizondo, E. C., & Loss, S. R. (2021). Free-ranging domestic cat abundance and sterilization percentage following five years of a trap–neuter–return program. Wildlife Biology, 2021(1). https://doi.org/10.2981/wlb.00799

del Hoyo, J., Collar, N., Kirwan, G. M., & Sharpe, C. J. (2022, October 25). Guadalupe storm-petrel (Hydrobates Macrodactylus), version 1.2. Birds of the World. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/guspet/cur/introduction

Dickman, C. R., & Newsome, T. M. (2015). Individual hunting behaviour and prey specialisation in the house cat Felis catus: Implications for conservation and management. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 173, 76–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2014.09.021

Edge. (2019, June 19). Guadalupe storm-petrel. EDGE of Existence. https://www.edgeofexistence.org/species/guadalupe-storm-petrel/

Galbreath, R., & Brown, D. (2004). The tale of the lighthouse-keeper’s cat: Discovery and extinction of the Stephens Island wren (Traversia lyalli). Notornis, 51(4).

Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources. (2025). Feral cats. Feral Cats. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasive-species-profiles/feral-cats/#:~:text=Feral%20cats%20on%20islands%20have,kill%20approximately%202.4%20billion%20birds.

Loss, S. R., Will, T., & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380

McGregor, H., Legge, S., Jones, M. E., & Johnson, C. N. (2015). Feral cats are better killers in open habitats, revealed by animal-borne video. PLOS ONE, 10(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133915

Medina, F. M., Bonnaud, E., Vidal, E., Tershy, B. R., Zavaleta, E. S., Josh Donlan, C., Keitt, B. S., Corre, M., Horwath, S. V., & Nogales, M. (2011). A global review of the impacts of invasive cats on Island Endangered Vertebrates. Global Change Biology, 17(11), 3503–3510. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

National Research Council. (1992, January 1). Scientific Bases for the Preservation of the Hawaiian Crow. U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235935/

NOAA. (2024, August 29). Toxoplasmosis and its effects on Hawaiʻi Marine Wildlife. NOAA Fisheries. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/pacific-islands/endangered-species-conservation/toxoplasmosis-and-its-effects-hawaii-marine

Read, J. L., Dickman, C. R., Boardman, W. S., & Lepczyk, C. A. (2020). Reply to Wolf et al.: Why trap-neuter-return (TNR) is not an ethical solution for Stray Cat Management. Animals, 10(9), 1525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091525

Reed, L. (2022). The effects of free-roaming cats on native wildlife populations. Wildlife Rehabilitation Bulletin, 40(1), 17–21. https://doi.org/10.53607/wrb.v40.250

Salano, E. (2024, October 5). Eliciting the effect free roaming cats have on Native Hawaiian wildlife using stable isotope analysis. UKnowledge. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/biology_etds/103/ 

Steele, J. H., Thorpe, S. A., & Turekian, K. K. (2009). Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences. Academic Press. 

My friend told me how he'd seen her before but she always vanished before he could catch her. He works far too many hours and is always tired so he couldn't prioritize catching this cat.

Three months pass with no sign of her. I go back with my partner to check on carcasses and this same little grey cat appears. This time, however, a tooth has been snapped off and her tongue is so badly cut that she can't keep it in her mouth. She was thin and dirty and screaming to please be given some food.

This time I couldn't look away. I asked my friend's girlfriend if I could borrow a cat carrier. She loaned me one and a tin of wet food that the grey cat willingly followed into the carrier. She didn't care at all about being put into the carrier - all she wanted was a hand on her. She'd arch up against the top just so my hand would rest on her back for a moment.

We drove through rush hour traffic to the only shelter still open. We knew we couldn't keep her and I couldn't stand the thought of putting her back out on the streets to die slowly.

The shelter couldn't take her. Her ear was clipped so she was a "community cat" and outside their ability to help. They tried desperately to offer alternatives to me as I cried over her carrier, knowing I couldn't take her home but also that if I didn't I couldn't live with the thought of her back on the streets.

I made a Hail Mary call to a local friend who is very connected in our city. They didn't have my number saved but answered all the same to hear me sobbing about a cat I'd found and to please help me find a place for her. Please. If I don't find something then she'll be alone on the streets again to die.

My friend came through. I could keep the cat in their garage overnight and in the morning my friend would be back in the city and could find someone to help the cat.

The shelter folk gave me a crate and some food - their hands were tied but they didn't want to leave me with nothing. They were good people doing the best they could in their own system. Community cats were ones they weren't allowed to "waste" resources on. Ostensibly they'd been dealt with and their fate decided. There was nothing the shelter folks were allowed to do for them.

I took the cat to my friend's garage. She was settled into a crate on towels, happy as a clam to be warm and safe. This was a cat made to be loved and to love, as she immediately began trying to groom one of my friend's roommates. He stayed in the garage with her, giving her food and water and in exchange having no say on whether she was in his lap or not. She was always in his lap.

Nobby Nobbs (so named for the only other character known to man that is as scrungly as she is) was then formally adopted by my friend. Her tongue has healed, her fur remains scrungly, and she's every bit the rabid love bug I suspected her to be when she came to me yelling to be pet.

She's a TNR cat. Someone thought they were doing her a kindness in that and if nothing else she didn't add kittens to the world but that doesn't negate the pain she suffered before I found her - the broken teeth, the lacerated tongue, the ulcerated cheeks, the flea-bald patchiness of her coat.

I say this as someone who adores this cat and has the privilege to see her loved and cherished: I wish she'd never had to suffer what she did. I wish people were alright making the harder call that leads to less misery on the side of the cats.

TNR is a polite fiction, nothing more. Just so the humans can pretend they've done right by the same cats they're letting loose to die miserably somewhere else. As long as the humans don't see it it's fine.

The shelter folks told me she's a community cat and that I could take her home and release her by my house. Then I could feed her myself and keep up with her and know where she was! I could still keep her, after a fashion.

I am not proud of how I snarled back that I would never exchange a quick death for a slow one. I would be giving her a different funeral plot, not giving her a life. Even near me she'd be just as vulnerable to the innumerable predators that find cats quite delicious, let alone cars and poisons and the other cruelties humans practice on stray cats.

She's the second stray cat I've met that when I held them the cat melted in my arms, purring and so desperately wanting to be loved. The first cat I was able to trap and take to a local shelter only to find when I called to check on him a day later that his health had been so terrible, so beyond help, that he'd been put down. All the love in that tiny body lost because the people I lived beside didn't care enough to trap the cats they had.

My partner was asleep. I woke her up to crawl into her arms and sob, my heart breaking for the stupidity of the humans who hadn't cared enough to grant this poor little cat the chance to be either an indoor cat, loved and cared for, or to grant him a quick death long before I met him. I've other stories of the cats they kept around, essentially feeding the poor souls to the predatory birds and wandering dogs that frequented our area.