cats are fluffy and sharp @mysidia@dragon.style

I love hanging out in Eorzea, sometimes, as myself.

I can throw fireballs! People can see I have cat ears and a tail! My skin can look tabby-striped!

...but also, it's really hard to travel around without ever being attacked by a hyperaggressive 6-foot-tall spider that wants to kill me.

I got a smilodon plushie!

Today we went to the Exotic Feline Breeding Center in Rosamond. It's basically a wildlife conservation center that breeds captive animals for zoos, so that zoos won't take more animals out of the wild.

They open to the public 3 nights per year. We get to watch the cats get Enrichment Activity stuff (like phone books, cardboard boxes, and watermelons). And it happens at twilight when the cats are starting to wake up.

Basically it's a lot like going to a zoo but with cats only, and you have to be over 18 to be allowed in, and the keepers hover around telling you facts and making sure nobody breaks any rules and gets et. And there's a raffle and a bake sale and stuff.

They have tons of leopards and a white tiger and itty sand cats and so on. There's like 70 cats, none of which are especially happy to see you, because they're cats and they probably wanted to sleep in. But all those admission tickets mean the center gets more funds for the kitties, so I guess they've just gotta roll with it. (Some of them did roll.)

The only thing i want out of any social media network is for ALL OF MY FRIENDS to be on it

If this is a "marketplace of ideas", then where can I go to sell mine off? I won't haggle; they're not as valuable as I used to believe, and there's no shortage of other dealers. I just want to retire from the business of dealing with them. Clearance sale, 100% off! Everything must go!

When I was a kid, I liked taking photos, but I had the crummiest cameras. And not only did I have to buy film and pay to develop it, and also buy an external flash attachment which cost a bit more than film per picture, but I never knew if the pic would turn out even visible until I got it back, which would take months because my parents wouldn't bother to develop mine before theirs, and...

What I am saying is that now that cameras are digital, I always take like 40 shots of just one little thing, and then have to keep most of them because I can't decide which one of like six nearly identical shots are the best. Then, later, I am annoyed at having so many.

Also I want to send a digital camera back in time to tiny me.

This is a totally cute name for a business, and I approve of their branding, but can we talk about cartoon bee faces never resembling bees either? They've got the opposite of the bat problem.

*Maybe* that could be counted as one faceted eye, but I'm not convinced that that's better... cyclops bee?

(I assume they'd like the advertising, so I won't blur out their info.)

My dash just brought up trans dragons and rainbow eyeballs. @behemoff , it must be paging you.

I'm not a force of creation; I'm a force of deconstruction.

batman's costume doesn't have a nose. zubat doesn't have a nose. no clipart-scale depictions of bats have faces at all. nobody seems to think this is a glaring omission in their design.

look, bats have faces. bats have a LOT of face. they are the very OPPOSITE of featureless. if you are going to design a bat, then it doesn't really look like a bat unless it has a ton of face. possibly more face than is entirely attractive. does it really have to have that nose. really.

bats are not elegant winged orbs. they are rats with ludicrous faces that crawled into the darkness? i like elegant winged orbs, but are they really batlike?

I wish I were better at reading people's ongoing works, or following current tv shows. In order to really get into something, I need to be able to see it at my own pace. Picking things up briefly and then dropping them keeps me from caring about the story as much.

Which sucks because when the whole thing is out, the hype simmers down. I wanted to wait and bingeread Harry Potter, but now it seems like a huge task, plus I know spoilers. Homestuck is kind of the same. I keep saying I'll watch Steven Universe when it's done, but now is when everyone else is hyped. When I'm peripherally so commonly exposed to things, by the time I get to them, the atmosphere and tone isn't novel.

But then again, I did get into Pokemon after twenty years of avoiding it, so who knows, really.

People probably construct pride over stuff like the country where they were born, even if they did nothing to make it better, because they're searching for something to be proud of.

Our cynical culture has told them nothing *they* have done is worth anything or a big deal. Either they're "trash", or they have a bigger future to work for and all they've done so far is "merely getting started"-- no wonder they feel like the only thing they're allowed to be proud of is something that they didn't work for, that is bigger than them. They've been assured via tons of propaganda that their country is a good, valid, proper thing to be proud of. (US public schools really lay this on thick, for one thing.) So they hang on to that.

People wanna champion their country for being somehow great, while simultaneously being terrified that it'll change and not be the exact thing it is, because this is what they were told was acceptable to be proud of, and they don't quite understand why but they don't want that to change...

If we honoured people's small victories more, they might not need to grab on to something like blind nationalism. Yes, it really MATTERS what you did right. What else do you think causes something to matter? Even if someone else might say "who cares, it's just a game" or "get a real job" or "I'll be proud of you when you finish college; I *expect* you to finish high school" or "your art sucks" or "we'll see how you handle THIS" or "l2p noob" or "no one would pay for that", that is just insensitivity and a poor allocation of values, not an assessment of whether you really ought to be proud of getting stuff done.

If you care, if you put in work, if you did your best, if you accomplished any thing at all, then it's more worth being proud of than a hundred sailing ships carrying a banner that happens to correspond with where you were born. Focus on what meant something, not what yells the loudest.

I just went to a US immigration ceremony. We were all in a big auditorium and they showed videos of scenery, people waving flags, and the Microsoft "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to unlock" screen. It was very patriotic.

I've done nothing useful today, and I'm completely allowed. Who made the rules saying I'd better get something done? I don't think I was really consulted to vote on that.

I don't "have to" finish my projects even if I've already worked so much on them that I'm tired out. That's not the way to make a good project anyway. I can only remember the most recent, disciplined work I forced myself to do on them. But before that, until I actually started *getting* somewhere, I was just messing around.

I killed off so much of my enthusiasm by making the project A Thing I Need To Work On. I don't have to make a game. I should be messing with it for funsies, or not work on it at all.

I do want to show everyone all the twists and stuff that I'm proud of, yes, and that does mean finishing. But I also want to be lazy. I wouldn't feel *obliged* to choose the more productive of the two if I didn't have this silly feeling that I should be more proud of the "productive" choice. Proud of what? As soon as I finished it, I'd start chiding myself to get to work on the next thing, anyway. I probably wouldn't say "wow, I made something huge", but "I need to keep this up..."

I'm not abandoning it, mind. It's just that I need to stop feeling like I *must* finish in order to justify all the work I've done so far. It's not worthless if nobody else ever sees it. Or, if it is, then it's worthless no matter who saw it. Yes, games are to be played, art is to be viewed, and stories are to be read; that's the project's goal. But whether it's met or not won't affect me that much in the end. If for no other reason, then because I'm not very good at stopping to enjoy accomplishments anyway.

It's 100% okay to do nothing today. I don't have to earn a right to exist. I can sit here just doing nothing and that's fine. (I have to tell myself often so that I can believe it.)