please do yourself a favor and watch The Cat Returns:
the premise is a school girl accidentally gets promised to the prince of a magical cat kingdom, so she has prevent herself from getting married to a cat
lotsof cats walking on two legs with hilarious walk cycles
ngl one of the main reasons i ship romione is because hermione got a cat that is the cat version of ron
…you just blew my entire mind
BIG, GINGER, GRUMPY, AND A LITTLE VIOLENT who am i talking about ron or crookshanks you don’t know
My mind keeps also drawing comparisons between Ron the Consistently Underappreciated with his overachieving brothers, and Crookshanks who languished at the pet store watching the cuter kittens get adopted…
This also makes Ron’s dislike of Crookshanks pretty hilarious
THAT IS ABSOLUTELY THE CRUX OF MY CROOKSHANKS IS THE CAT VERSION OF RON PHILOSOPHY. Fucking of course he hates that cat because he is that cat and he is Ron fucking Weasley. If Ron Weasley had a double that double would be better than him and he’d hate him too.
And of course Hermione has a soft spot for the most disagreeable, underdog cat in the world.
Befrends a lonly black haired dog who had spent years neglected and locked away.
Can we just let him out on good behaivor? Cause that’s fucking outstanding.
“I’ve been getting these emails saying that, y’know it’s not my position to judge anybody. And I wanna make it quite clear that I didn’t judge him. Y’know I know God is the only judge we have. I just set the appointment up.”
I don’t even believe in God and that’s still a badass quote.
🤷
My nigga said he set the appointment up. Legendary.
His lawyer was smiling like a proud father
Y’know I know God is the only judge we have. I just set the appointment up”
so the best thing about this is that bobcats, like just about every feline besides lions and domestic cats, are pretty solitary. they don’t really have friends. they aren’t really equipped to make friends.
domestic cats, on the other hand, do know how to make friends. they are friendly to the point that lots of feral cats live in colonies— the females hang out together, even raise kids together, and the males like to spend nonsexual time with their baby mommas. they groom each other, play around, and have a particular tail position to signal to one another— straight up with the tip curled— that they’re friendly and happy to see each other. cats learned how to be chill with each other in order to take full advantage of human food sources: an ancient granary supplies enough rats for a lot of cats, as does a modern lady with a big bag of frisky bits, so it would be a waste of time and energy for any one cat to try and stake the entire foodsource out for exclusive use. less fighting means more eating and resting which means a longer, nicer life and a lot more kittens.
so this stray cat, she obviously has no colony if she’s wandering around and sneaking into zoo enclosures, so she’s like ‘hey! there’s food here! what up, other cat, let’s be friends, let’s be friends and share that food’. and the bobcat is like ‘??????’ because actually wild cats are pretty cautious about initiating hostilities and anything new and aggressive makes them very worried. and the domestic cat is like ‘haha cool, ok, we’re friends now, big guy. no problems.’ and the bobcat is like ‘????? well…?? ok?’ and then they are friends.
the super interesting thing about most wild cat species is they don’t really have the capacity to make friends on their own, especially outside of sibling bonds, but, if someone comes along and does all the friend-making themselves, they’ll totally roll with it. zoo cats can get really attached to their caregivers— or, in this case, a very confident little calico demonstrating exactly why her species has been so darn successful over the last nine thousand years .
so anyway that is the best thing: bobcats are not equipped to make friends, but luckily for this bobcat this homeless lady did not give any shits and made friends anyway. and now they are both happy.
Q: Are you still doing the "dead fandoms" thing? Because I've got two: the Foundation trilogy (in 1966 it beat out the Lord of the Rings for the "best series of all time" Hugo; a few years ago io9 did a SF series bracket and it lost to BSG in the first round), and Max Headroom.
What I think happened with the Foundation series is that, like Heinlein, who for several generations was THE science fiction writer, it suffered because there stopped being one single way to become a scifi fan, one single path to becoming one.
What I mean is, if you were a scifi fan in 1970, for instance, the way you became a scifi fan was pretty linear: you usually got in through paperbacks that were omnipresent at the drugstore, you started reading the magazines too, which is how the average guy would find scifi for the first time, and realized there was a community around all this weird stuff, you got a fanzine or two or went to the WorldCons or some of the other conventions, and before you knew it, you were telling private jokes about corflu, Ghu, and the Feast of Bosco (all pre-internet fandom memes) alongside Sam Moskowitz, David Kyle, Uncle Forry and the rest of your fellow Slans.
If there’s one path to being a fan, then there’s one core canon of key texts, things “everybody has to read.” That’s what having a unified fan culture does, it says “you have to read this.” Put this at the core of your identity. Just like groups into certain genres of music identify the key albums and songs to their identity that everyone in the group has to know. And that’s why we had Foundation and Heinlein at the center of scifi fandom for decades.
But…what happens when there are multiple routes to becoming a scifi fan? The internet was at the center of this fragmentation. There are people who got into scifi because they loved Valdemar and the Mists of Avalon, and they found other people through the internet newsgroups who did too, and who never even heard of Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land or any of the things fans were “supposed to have read.”
In short, this was how Heinlein went from THE scifi writer and Foundation went from THE scifi series to being just another writer and just another book on a shelf of scifi books.
There are some elements of Foundation too, that make it less compelling to the eyes of modern readers as tastes change. For example, Foundation is a part of a scifi subgenre that has fallen into disfavor: the “God’s Eye View” scifi novel that goes over history in a huge sweep, which often covers thousands of years and entire civilizations in a blink of an eye. The reason why this ambitious subgenre of scifi fell out of favor is obvious: scifi fandom expects characterization to be a part of a scifi story, and the “God’s Eye View of History” scifi story is light on characterization and even characters.
The first and most influential “God’s Eye View” novel is Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, which covers all 10 million years of human history. There are other books that tell stories by hitting the fast forward button on history, nearly all of them inspired by Stapledon, who wanted to find the wider themes of human history and by how we’d transform as we enter the cosmos, possibly becoming something entirely unfamiliar or inhuman. Arthur C. Clarke in particular owes a debt to Stapledon.
Stapledon, actually, is a much better candidate for a Dead Fandom than Foundation, since Stapledon is for the most part in total oblivion despite being one of the central figures of early scifi fandom. Like John Carter of Mars, “Last and First Men”are like the grandfathers of science fiction, inspiring the people who inspire everyone else.
Confession: I have never been able to finish a single thing written by Heinlein. I just can’t stand his prose at all.
My infection vector for Science Fiction fandom was the original Star Trek and the original Star Wars. If you feel like it, reblog this and add whatever your infection vector for SF/F fandom was. I bet it’ll be interesting. Oh, and add your age, if you want. I’m 45 and grew up in Southern California.
OK BUT THE THREAD??? Tumblr this is what kills me, you screenshot an amazing Tweet but don’t link to the source or UNROLL THE THREAD! So then I have to go read Twitter myself and lose my entire goddamn mind. Anyway!
There was another amazing thread on how fucked the Domino’s pothole-filling squad was, but this was from the same poster so it was easy to find. The other thread was about the concept of “prevailing wage” and how Domino’s was surely paying their workers minimum, meaning the job wasn’t going to skilled tradesmen and is further aiding the slippage of the former middle classes into poverty, but now I can’t find it. Anyway! There’s some underpinnings for that punchline.
