Zorin's Mewsings

My friend has a GreaseWeazle and a 5.25" floppy drive. This arrangement lets you read raw data off 5.25" floppies from pretty much any platform.

I brought over my Apple II floppies from my childhood. I had already imaged them all in the late 90s, but I got curious if they still read.

They still read. Even the oldest one, dated December 1983 that my dad gave me as my first floppy disk when I was six years old.

The few that had bad blocks were ones I remember having bad blocks when I tried back in 1999. So I don't think they even degraded much since then.

The media longevity of the original Shugart SA400 floppy disk system is absolutely astounding. It completely blows my mind. FOURTY YEARS LATER and the disk still reads with zero errors like it was written yesterday.

The First Disk. Probably the first computer media I ever held in my hands in my entire life.

The Apple II was a Christmas surprise in 1983. So dad had created this floppy for me a week in advance.

As some of you might know already, Lynxie, my beautiful grey tabby cat, passed away this morning at the vet from chronic kidney disease. He was almost 21 years old.

Lynxie was my first cat. Lynxie was my first pet. He was also my only pet until Annie came along in late 2014. He meant so much to me, and we had so many good times over the years.

In the first half of his life he was a crazy, super playful, bitey rascal constantly causing trouble. He would nip pretty hard since he was separated from his mom and littermates at a young age and never really learned to play properly. But he eventually stopped doing it as much. He was never really a lap cat back then, but he was always nearby, wanting to be where the action was.

In the second half, and especially the last 2-3 years, Lynxie became the sweet, affectionate, lovable cat that I never expect he would become. In the past year especially he spent a lot of time in my lap, competing for that space with Annie who has been a lap cat from the start. His meows and trills will forever echo in my memories; I'm going to miss that voice so much.

Lynxie was the best cat. I will miss him so much.

I hear a lot of complaining about Twitter refugees coming to Tumblr. Ya'll should be more welcoming to us! Twitter was there when Tumblr users started to flee after the Verizon takeover. Now that Tumblr has a more sensible owner again and is improving, while Twitter was acquired by a complete nutcase, you should be more welcoming to people escaping Twitter. I think we can all agree that we all hate Elon Musk.

As it is we're being scattered to the wind; some of us are going to Mastodon, others Tumblr, others *shudder* Facebook. It's NEVER going to be the same for us. Have a little sympathy.

As those who have followed me elsewhere know, I have two cats. There's Lynxie, my first cat, who is now four months short of being 21 years old, and Annie, my younger cat, who turned eight this year.

Lynxie's health has been faltering a bit in the past few months, as can be expected for a cat his age. He's on two medications now, is having trouble using the litterbox on his own, and has lost a lot of weight. I have to feed him wet food multiple times a day and make sure he gets enough, all the while watching and making sure Annie doesn't steal his food.

It's tiring, in a way, it's made it harder to get away on longer trips, but it's all worth it for Lynxie whom I adore so much.

For nearly all his life, Lynxie has had His Chair. A bamboo chair that he slept in pretty much every day. It was HIS. Annie wouldn't dare sit there. If you put Annie on it she would immediately jump out like a spring.

Several months ago, Lynxie lost interest in the chair and started spending time in another part of the house. Just a complete sudden loss of any desire to be there. The chair has sat empty since then, until today when I found Annie laying in it.

Enough time had passed that Annie felt safe claiming what used to be Lynxie's chair. It was an emotional moment; I'm so glad it happened while Lynxie was still alive because giving up His Chair was his choice. It also amazed me how Annie basically respected Lynxie's space and didn't intrude on it until a lot of time had passed.

So now Lynxie's chair has become Annie's chair. And Lynxie is okay with it. And he's been eating well these past few days so I'm in a good place right now.

(On a side note, it feels good to write long-form text again; maybe making a Tumblr was a better idea than I thought!)

Lynxie in His Chair in 2012:

Annie in what is now her chair today:

I'm still using Twitter, sharing stuff, seeing the cool things people say and the art that people post, and I just have to remind myself that over half the company has been fired within a week of it being acquired.

There's no freaking way Elon and his toadies could find out within a week who was essential to keeping the site running and who could genuinely be dismissed without much consequence. Considering half of the company is gone, you just know there are critical systems that aren't being maintained right now. I suspect bad things will happen soon.

That's how it goes with IT. You stop maintaining something, it keeps working fine for a while but then it breaks. Then there's nobody around who remembers how to fix it. So it stays broken until the team can learn about what broke and get it working. Twitter is a very large site that has to handle unbelievable concurrency; that learning curve will be large.