Kai Wren, Godslayer and Lord Demon, 2001-2019

A lump in her lungs, says Emily. She's on oxygen.

Goddammit.

When Joe and Spotless moved out, we decided we needed a second cat for Chaos. So we talked to Bert. By then Bert had moved to a house out on a dirt road, and had a whole mess of cats coming and going at all hours. Kai was the one we could catch, so she was the one who came home. She was a muted tricolour calico (there's a word for it but I'm not coming up with it) (Edit: "dilute tortoiseshell," and let me tell you, tortitude is definitely a thing even diluted), all brown and grey with hints of orange.

She was always "the kitten," first because she was a kitten and then because she was so much smaller than Chaos. For a long time she was the skittish cat where Chaos was the friendly cat, likely due to having spent the first couple months of her life as a semiferal. But sometime after we moved to Vancouver she decided people were Good, if they weren't being too loud. So for the last N years she spent a lot of time in warm laps or on her fuzzy-blanketed catbed. If multiple people were on the couch she wanted to sit on all of them. She missed Chaos something fierce when we took him to get nuked, and even more when we took him away and he didn't come back again.

The last time I saw her was October of 2017. She was tiny and brown-going-grey and she grumped at me from her heated catbed and was happy to get petted.

Dammit, little cat. You couldn't hold on for two more days, so I could be there.

silly distractionary things

... that have been hanging out in a textfile waiting to be posted.

Meet the Fmitths: "Sleve and Tobb Fmitth are a perfectly ordinary Earth human bondpair. They enjoy typical Earth human activities such as watching TV, walking their dog, converting pleasant sounds into sustenance, and using the replicator from their ship to convert junk into gold and other materials Earth humans consider valuable, and trading those materials for weird green paper Dol-Larz to exchange for goods and services."

New favorite brand of humor: "mixing different kinds of scales, such as: ... The Kinsey-Kardashev scale, for measuring how gay a civilization is."

And a brilliant Twitter thread on the evolution of the Pacific NW Tree Octopus: "How did this specialized, limited range of arboreal mollusks ever evolve into the gigantic jungle island nightmares we know and love? The answer, as always, is seagulls."

And finally, one prettiness via Jim Hines: Perfectly Timed Pictures does what it says on the tin.