To Live Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure

Obvious disclaimer that you shouldn't have wild animals as pets.

But like, cheetahs are the only large cats that keepers will do free contact with. Hell, even most small cats don't get free contact. (Because small cats can be VICIOUS. They'll have a baby pallas cat wearing thicker gloves than when handling an owl. Because small cats can just be vicious.)

Like I think the only other cat at our zoo where I've seen free contact with was servals? Because I know they've used servals in shows to demonstrate their natural jumping ability. But I know servals can sometimes have a mean temper as well. Meanwhile they'll do the cheetah run and afterwards put the mic by the cheetahs and it's just like an engine with them purring. It's fascinating to watch when the message in every other large animal is "no free contact because it's dangerous even when they're born in captivity".

beautiful darling mutual abs0entr0 said he looked like a zen garden. i had to. i had to.

I really need you to picture a lord farquaad being dummy yeeted into the air by an incoming vehicle while a golf cart of inebriated, glitter and mud plastered coworkers are full-on horror movie screaming together. before we can even process this, lord farquaad gets up like 🤪 how bout that drink?? completely okay, utterly unphased, red hat and bob wig still locked the fuck in. we check on him several times, all talking over each other, and while he’s calmly and pleasantly assuring us he’s fine, he passes each one of us a tiny jesus figurine. he bestows a “god bless you all” and then resumes his jaunt, drink in hand.

I def think everyone should carry a healthy amount of skepticism in an age where virality is often more prioritized than the truth but!! behold, a piece of my workplace’s holiday mailer. my coworker is the designer of this mailer and she included all sorts of references to our experiences in 2025. she was one of my coworkers on the golf cart with me and of course, included an ode to farquaad

I was gonna say 'like WW2' but then rapidly remembered that neither of the existing world wars involved like. much of any direct damage to civilian populations either because America's eternal wars haven't touched its own soil since like the 1860s. except for Pearl Harbour, which was literally One Attack in the whole of WW2 (and which was also primarily targeting a military base. and was in a colonized nation far from the mainland USA). I am not kidding if you look up 'attacks on American soil' every single thing since 1900 except individual attacks (Pearl Harbour and 9/11, basically plus a couple of border skirmishes with Mexico) is like 'America was attacked In The Gulf States' or 'America was attacked In Asia'. like mate where is the US? you can't count attacks on military bases as 'attacks on US soil' unless you need to bulk out the list which. look at the history.

Like imo one of the reasons the US is so comfortable being leisurely belligerent against Literally Any Country In The World is that it's been literally well over a century since the fight actually came to them. why WOULD the US government stop being blindly aggressive when the only costs are financial?

and instead of being primarily concerned about like. the actual thousands of people who are actually gonna die in these strikes. every time the US's unprovoked aggression hits a nuclear state of a state with a measure of international heft, the loudest concern from Americans is OH NO WHAT IF THIS ONE'S WW3

because. war is so abstract and foreign. because it's spent 150 years constantly happening Over There and only involving Americans who are in the military. foreign wars don't register as a threat because they're NOT a threat to Americans (the only Real People) and the way in which they're frightening is the abstract possibility that the other party might at some point bring America actually into the war. which has basically never happened so it's this vast unknown threat.

Preliminary figures today (4 March) is 787 Iranians killed since 28 February. so forgive me if I say you're proving my point pretty effectively.

similarly yes you are correct WWII was a nuclear war. so far the only one. a war in which the US made the decision to kill over 200,000 people Over There on a different continent and then spent the next 80 years making sure nobody else would be able to either retaliate or do anything similar. And the American (and Western) relationship to nuclear arms remains primarily not 'Jesus Christ I cannot believe America killed close to a quarter of a million people in a civilian centre with one set of orders' but 'oh noooooo what if this means we have to mitigate our aggression in case they do something like this BACK TO US'.

so. again. my point. war in the American cultural imagination remains an abstract thing that THEY do to OTHER PEOPLE where the concept of any enemy action reaching people in civilian centres is so completely abstracted it just becomes a boogeyman and apparently we should still be talking about the 7 American civilians that were killed in a war that claimed in the region of 6-13 million civilian lives in Europe, Africa and Asia.

bonus/proof: