CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.
The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.
I had momentarily allowed myself to hope they would rise above their lying nature. Indeed, the last we checked in with them, AVFM founder Paul Elam was admitting that “as much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point,” and promising that he would investigate further. Indeed, he promised,
I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
Instead, Elam has given the man who seems to be at the center of the fraud — “managing editor” Dean Esmay — free rein to provide yet another completely contradictory, and completely unbelievable, account of the whole thing.
And instead of addressing the fraud in public in a new post, Esmay has attached this new explanation to the bottom of the original post, knowing that this way many fewer people are likely to see it. I’m sure he’d prefer if he could post it at the bottom of a deep well.
Before we get to the latest (and I assume final) round of lies, here a quick recap of this somewhat complicated story, in simplified form. (Skip past the numbered items if you’ve been following the case, or go here, here, and here if you want the gory details and links.)
1) A Voice for Men reposts a blog post by Jason Gregory of American Idiocracy making the bizarre (and false) claim that if you Google the phrase “violence against men,” you get results dealing not with that topic but with “violence against women” instead. As many readers of the article notice, and as I point out in this post, this is not true: the results are overwhelmingly related to violence against men, as you would expect.
2) AVFM managing editor Dean Esmay writes a confusing editor’s note suggesting that before AVFM ran its article on the subject, the results from a Google query for“violence against men” were full of links to pages on “violence against women” but that somehow AVFM’s attention to the topic caused Google to modify its search algorithms so that searching for “violence against men” would return results related to “violence against men.” So even though their article appeared wrong, he claims, they were really right, and they had improved Google’s search returns to boot!
3) He also posts a screenshot, which he indicates was made before AVFM posted its article, and which purports to show search results for the phrase “violence against men,” and which shows numerous search results dealing with “violence against women.”
4) I demonstrate conclusively (in this post) that the screenshot is a blatant fraud, in two ways.
First, I show that the actual search phrase being used was “violence against” not “violence against men,” and that whoever made the screenshot simply typed the word “men” into the search box before making the screenshot in order to make it look like the search was for “violence against men.”
Second, by looking at the news results in the search, I show that it had been made AFTER the AVFM article ran, not before, thus completely undercutting Esmay’s explanation.
5) Esmay announces that he has “found” the evidence that he’d thought he “lost,” that he will be writing an updated article on the subject with these newly found screenshots, and that “David Futrelle is caught out as a dishonest weasel once again.” He does not say how exactly I am supposed to have lied.
6) As I am banned from posting comments at AVFM, I take my evidence to the comments section of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What’s blog. Amazingly, one AVFM regular actually reads my post and concludes that I’m right. Even more amazingly, Elam shows up, also admits I’m right about something, and promises a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may investigation.
7) Well, so much for that.
And that’s how we got to the steaming pile of lies that Esmay deposited on AVFM yesterday. Let’s go through it paragraph by paragraph; there’s just so much to digest. Brace yourself for some very strange logic, and some very poor writing. And lies, lots of lies.
Esmay starts off by trying his hardest to deflect attention away from both his original mistake — running a post whose central claim is blatantly false — and his later coverup of this mistake through fraud.
His first attempt at misdirection? Mocking me for … pointing out how incompetent and dishonest he is, while half-assedly half-admitting that I sort of nailed him. He goes on about this for three long paragraphs before even getting to his “explanation” for his fraud. Feel free to skim; it’s all pretty much frantic hand-waving on his part.
My thanks to Dave Futrelle of Manboobz. In his increasing efforts to remain relevant, he’s published multiple stories on this one little article already. In a way it’s pretty cool; we need people to hold us to high standards, after all, and even dishonest people can help others to stay honest. Futrelle is holding us to standards as high as the mainstream media, which is pretty awesome, although we want to be held to even higher standards than that. So in that sense, he’s being useful: if we publish something we can’t back up, we need to admit it. Thank you, Dave.
I also want to thank Dave for tacitly admitting we’re as important as a mainstream news organ by giving this much attention to one small story–a small part of a much bigger story of internet censorship, one that I somehow think the Dave Futrelle of the 1990s would have been on our side of.
So I thank Dave Futrelle for helping me catch an error I should have caught in the first place. I also thank him for unwittingly helping expose just how lopsided the content on “violence against women” is versus “violence against men” when you look online, even though men are demonstrably more often the victim of violence than women are.
Finally, Esmay gets to the actual topic at hand. Sort of. (In what follows, I’m going to add some paragraph breaks to Esmay’s walls of text, but this is otherwise unedited.)
The fact is that I did witness the Google behavior I mentioned in Update 2. However, Jason emailed us a screen shot after publication (not before) that has been wrongly declared a forgery. It is not a forgery.
The screenshot he links to here is the same one posted earlier, which I showed conclusively was faked. (I’ve pasted it in again at the end of the post as well.)
It was made after this confusion began, to show us what Jason’s post-publication results looked like and to express Jason’s own confusion privately, to us.
Here Esmay concedes one point: the screenshot was made after the AVFM article ran.
That screenshot shows an artifact caused by Jason’s slow internet connection, his screen shot software, and his browser, which he was able to demonstrate to my satisfaction is in fact a glitch and is not reasonably declared a forgery.
Really? Really?! That’s so amazing I have to read it again:
That screenshot shows an artifact caused by Jason’s slow internet connection, his screen shot software, and his browser, which he was able to demonstrate to my satisfaction is in fact a glitch and is not reasonably declared a forgery.
This is the best you can come up with? It reminds me a bit of those pat explanations Tommy Lee Jones trotted out for the civilians in Men in Black:
All right, Beatrice, there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
Remember, Esmay is trying to explain away the fact that the phrase “violence against men” appears in the search box in the screenshot, while the search results are clearly for “violence against.”
Any ubergeeks out there can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure there is no “glitch” in the world that would RANDOMLY ADD THE WORD “MEN” TO SEARCH BOXES IN SCREENSHOTS.
And I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing about a “slow internet connection” could possibly explain that either.
And Esmay knows that. He’s simply counting on his readers to never ever check what I actually wrote, and just to assume that I noticed some small glitch in the screenshot and declared it a forgery because of that.
You’ll notice that Esmay never once refers specifically to any of my charges, nor does he link to the posts in which I make them. He is relying on his readers to never wander from the AVFM walled garden to look at my posts. And the fact is that most of them won’t.
That’s the entirely of his response to my charge of forgery: it was just a “glitch.”
Looking at the screenshot again, I see something that I missed earlier: the letters “Jas” off to the right at the top, which suggests that the file came from someone whose Google account starts with those letters — the most likely culprit being Jason Gregory. So perhaps the fraud originated with Gregory, and Esmay was initially taken in by it.
Of course, they two may have cooked it up together. Or Esmay may have photoshopped the “Jas” onto the screenshot. Or the word “men.”
At this point this doesn’t much matter: however it originated, Esmay has thrown himself fully into perpetuating the fraud.
I rushed when I first saw it to assume it was the pre-publication screen shot when it wasn’t and promised an update on that here.
Yeah, and you also called me a liar, in two separate places.
An editor new to the process here at AVfM rushed in behind me and linked that post-publication screen shot to my words saying “We witnessed this behavior” above, effectively putting words in my mouth. That is bumble #2 and #3 on our part.
I’m sorry. I literally laughed out loud when I read this patent bullshit. So it’s the fault of an (imaginary?) “new” editor, huh? “Rushing in?” The AVFM offices must be a busy, bustling place indeed! Oh, wait, you don’t have offices, do you?
Also, “bumble?” Those aren’t bumbles. This is a Bumble.
Anyway, there seems to be an awful lot of “rushing” going on at A Voice for Men. Evidently they are always on deadline at AVFM, and every split second counts, and there’s no time to check facts or spelling — or even, it seems, to come up with lies that sound even vaguely plausible.
Dave Futrelle has been on the internet long enough to know that search engine results on uncommon phrases (like “violence against men”) can change daily, and that a site as big as A Voice for Men will, in fact, alter search results on Google within hours.
Don’t flatter yourself, guys. And it’s not an uncommon phrase. At all. Searching for the phrase “violence against men” in quotes brought up more than 2.5 million hits for me. (YMMV, but I’m guessing it’ll be a similarly huge number.) “Violence against marmosets who enjoy soup,” by contrast, is a rare phrase, and I can proudly say that my little blog has had considerable influence over the search results for that phrase. Sorry, I should say “search result.”
He continues on with the Google nonsense:
He also almost certainly knows that companies like Google have huge teams of people who work daily to test and improve results, thus causing search results on uncommon phrases like “violence against men” to change pretty quickly. As the old phrase goes, “the elephant squeezed mightly to give birth to the mouse.”
Is it just me or does that last bit sound really … dirty?
Anyway, Esmay then he tries once again to distract attention from his lies. Aspiring journalists, take note: This is how NOT to handle things when you fuck up.
It’s pathetic, really, to make this much out of this little. But Dave Futrelle has been given this opportunity because I personally failed to take and include a screen shot before publication, I rushed an update, and a green editor added a link she shouldn’t have post-production. It’s a mistake we have discussed among the editorial team and we will not repeat it.
So now the “green editor” is a woman. I should have known.
When in doubt, blame a woman!
It was probably TheWoolyBumblebee, right, using a time machine to do some editing after you fired her, right?
I may still go ahead and publish an article schooling Futrelle’s misguided readers on exactly how things like Google work, although at this point our screwup on this matter has resulted in so much work and so much pointless confusion it may not be worth it.
Yeah, you’re never going to write that article because you want everyone to forget about all this as soon as possible.
I stand by Jason Gregory, but I regret my error in not taking the screen shot before publication.
Well, it doesn’t appear that Jason Gregory — hey you got his name right, for once — stands by you, as he has rewritten the piece on his own blog in a very revealing way. More on this below.
We do not and will never have the screen shot Futrelle demands.
Aw, so when you wrote so definitively in your previous update — and in your Monday news roundup — that you had “found” the screenshots, plural, and that I was a liar, that was … a lie? Or was it just you just blurting out something that you thought was true without checking? A really long, involved typo? Something a monkey typed on your computer when you weren’t in the room? A glitch caused by Jason’s slow internet connection? Swamp gas reflected the light from Venus?
It would be nice if he would retract the claim of forgery, but that’s up to him; I don’t believe it is one and have ample reason to believe otherwise. We do, however, withdraw this story by Jason because of the lack of an available screen shot to demonstrate the pre-publication search results. This is my screwup ultimately folks. Sorry about that.
Oh, you “withdraw” the story. No harm no foul, right guys!
In the world of journalism, that’s not how it works. In the world of journalism, people get fired over this sort of thing — and worse. Forging evidence is a step below plagiarism. It’s a career-ender.
Obviously, I don’t have definitive proof that Esmay himself forged the screencap — and Jason Gregory could well be the culprit. Or someone else. But Esmay’s assorted explanations are literally unbelievable; even if you assume he’s the most gullible and incompetent person in the world, and he certainly shows evidence of both gullibility and incompetence, you have to admit that his ever-changing explanations are full of shit.
How many others at A Voice for Men are complicit in this fraud? Like, say, AVFM top banana Elam? For all we know, he may have instigated the whole thing in the first place. If not, and it was Esmay’s baby all along, then Elam is certainly culpable for allowing Esmay to be the one to write the “update” on his own misdeeds. (“I investigated the murder, boss, and I’m innocent!”)
One final thought from Dean:
I’d especially like to thank AVfM regular TallWheel for bringing all this to our attention and not letting us ignore it. –DE
Really, Dean? You didn’t, perhaps, notice that I was writing about you in stories with titles like “Worse than Wrong: A Voice for Men resorts to phony screenshot and outright lying to avoid admitting embarrassing error?” Dude, you MENTIONED ME IN YOUR EDITORS NOTE. And you called me a “liar.” Obviously you were aware of what I was writing.
I think you were forced to react when TallWheel and other AVFMers were forced to confront my evidence publicly in a setting that you and Paul didn’t directly control — that is, the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog.
Gosh, maybe you need to have a talk with her about letting people you don’t like post comments on her blog. Hard to run a cult properly if you don’t have the proper milieu control.
It’s truly comical to see AVFM double and triple down on this nonsensical idea that they were always right and that before their article ran, Google really did return endless “violence against women” search results when you searched for “violence against men.”
Because if you go over to the blog of Jason Gregory, the author of the post in question, you can see that, even if he might have been the original source of the forged screenshot, he’s not pretending that his blog post was right in the first place, and that A Voice for Men magically changed the search results so it appeared wrong. Indeed, he seems to have implicitly (if not explicitly) admitted his gigantic error by replacing the old piece with a rewritten one that makes a very different central claim.
It’s the blog post he should have written in the first place — one that shows that when you search for the phrase “violence against,” (not “violence against men“) it returns lots of results relating to “violence against women” and many fewer relating to “violence against men.” What that means, I don’t know, but at least that claim is true.
I believe that’s the post that he originally meant to write, but that for some reason — innocent or deceptive, I don’t know — he added the word “men” when he wrote the blog post, which made for a more dramatic claim, but one that was proven wrong as soon as anyone tried the search on their own. AVFM reposted his blog post, clearly without checking it, and everything since then has been an attempt to cover up their mistake.
A simple correction would have sufficed. But instead Dean Esmay has shown the world his true character, and so has A Voice for Men.
One little addendum. As I’ve noted in previous stories, Esmay has had some trouble remembering the name of AVFM’s own writer, Jason Gregory, calling him in some instances “Jason Thompson” and in other cases “Joshua Thompson.” Well, yesterday he went and tried to fix his errors — but didn’t quite catch them all.
Seems like Dean himself may be a little green, editing-wise.
Well, nothing to worry about, really, because after this nonsense, there’s no reputable publication in the world that would hire him.
NOTE: For more on A Voice for Men’s ongoing troubles with the truth, see these posts:
JohntheOther: I totally didn’t lie about Rebecca Watson, Take Two
Reno calls a domestic violence hotline: The MRA Reality Distortion Field in action
A Voice for Men has 99 problems, and the word “bitch” is one
The screenshot at the heart of all this:
The old phrase “the elephant squeezed mightly to give birth to the mouse” yields two Google results. Voice for Men and Manboobz. Assuming Mr. Esmay might have missed the i in “mightily,” that phrase yields zero results. To be fair, maybe Mr. Esmay personally has been using that phrase for a long time.
Here’s what I think really happened…
A very concerned and resourceful MRA infiltrated Google, from a grassy knoll, to precipitate an editorial crisis within AVfM. Why?
Simple… Their “founder and publisher” is a very busy man (but he rarely points this out) and be needs some help. So, the MRA at Google used magical powers to mess with searches to cause editorial meltdown to male Paul Elam finally *see* that he is actually too busy and needs help. Other MRAs will realize they have to get active or further mistakes will happen.
Dean Esmay, valiantly, lays down his short lived editorial career for the greater good. And the MRM continues to fight it’s way towards final victory.
They are both equally good, and I am proud of both of you.
*finds some magnets and hangs both screenshots on the fridge*
🙂
Oh, lord. The ridiculous chain of events which Esmay describes even sound like lies. I can’t even read them without thinking “that’s a lie.”
The only thing the “slow connection” excuse could reasonably mean in the real world is that the screenshot depicts a scenario where the (inept) googler has typed in “violence against,” gotten results, then proceeded to type in “men,” immediately taking a screenshot after adding “men” but before the results changed. This is already an implausible, quasi-acrobatic act, but the googler would have to know there was a difference between the results, either immediately or when he reviewed the screenshot afterwards. The only way for the person offering the screenshot as evidence for the state of affairs which was originally described is deliberate dishonesty.
If Esmay’s/Josh Jason Jingleheimer Smith’s claim is that the results updated to the “violence against men” search, but that the article recommendations based on “violence against” did not update, then we already know that’s a lie because the fraudulent screenshot shows an article where the word “men” appears, but is not highlighted. That’s the opposite of what would occur if the screenshot depicted the results for “violence against men”.
What’s amazing is that the accountability, by all rights, should fall on Jason Alexander or whatever this guy’s name is, but Esmay has taken up this fellow’s banner of lies and gone further with it than Pope Josh Gregory Thomas III ever could have.
Please, Dean, do explain to us how google works. I can’t wait.
Also, Esmay’s weird Elephant giving birth to a mouse is an idiosyncratic take on the phrase “the mountain labored to bring forth a mouse.” I was surprised to learn it comes from ancient times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_in_Labour
Clearly, Esmay is using some kind of proprietary search engine that only gives incorrect results. It must be good: I’ll google it.
Biscuit’s reaction to Esmay’s latest fuckery.
It’s the “squeezed mightily” that makes it such a wonderful idiom. Downright Fidelbogenian.
I love, LOVE how he explains why David is lying: “He’s lying because he says it’s a forgery and I don’t think it is one.”
You ever want an example of the solipsistic lack of awareness of a certain personality type, there it is.
“Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Is there anyone at AVfM that’s not a moron and/or jackass?”
NOPE. It’s pretty much jackassess all the way down.
But this was their year guys!!!!!! Their amazing year that was going to break the truth over our heads and allow their gushy, kind of clumpy, truth to wash us all free of our silly notions. Like consent and self- determination. I feel robbed. I might just be a hairy-legged harridan who no man would look at but at least I know how the Google yokey works.
So, apparently I took the wrong week to try to find a new job! The hilarity has been non-stop around here and I’ve missed it!! (WAH!!!)
I actually tried that a couple of times and my results still refreshed too quickly for me to get that screenshot done. When trying to replicate the ‘slow connection glitch’ I was still unable to generate the image in only one screenshot. I even tried typing in the ‘violence against’ part and just pasting in the last word right before I did the capture. I wasn’t able to come up with a scenario in which some image paste-up wasn’t required. I has a skeptical…
Actually, this is one of my initial theories of Violenceagainstgate. Ages ago, I worked for an architect who had little or no experience with computers but who had decided that he HAD to use them in order to be ‘up to the minute’ in his practice. He was a decent designer but mostly incompetent when it came to anything having to do with professional behavior. After he spent a weekend with all the manuals for our new software, suddenly his explanation for all the delays and business mistakes he was making had these semi-plausible tech phrases in them. So his design wasn’t late in being sent to the printer because he didn’t factor in the time needed to complete and compress the files. Nope, there was a DNS error on the print company’s ftp site and so the prints would be ready for pickup on Monday morning, not Thursday afternoon. So sorry for the delay, out of our hands, you know (charming smile, wink). And then he would finish the work and have me walk the plans over to the printer on a disk at the last possible minute to have them printed in time (he never did figure out how to ftp a file, just how to explain the potential problems with the process…).
It’s like the folks at AVFM are trying to use an arglebargle of tech buzzwords they barely know the meaning of hoping that their audience knows even less (or that the audience will give them the benefit of the ‘doubt’ for ideological reasons).
Also, let’s assume that all of this shit they claim is true; Google search results for “violence against men” do, in fact, only include search results that are about violence against women.
Here’s the thing; nearly every single major anti-domestic abuse website I’ve seen certainly emphasizes violence against women, but I can’t recall a single one that doesn’t also have a section about violence against men. I even see those websites go as far as to talk about the misconceptions surrounding violence against men (e.g. male rape myths).
Just a thought!
inurashii already beat me to the reference 🙁 And it was one I actually knew!
I want to know how, with no one apparently doing the google search to see that this was clearly not true before David started talking about it, their “searching for the phrase” was so powerful it apparently changed Google’s results…
In addition, I’m under the impression that Google starts to personalize results based upon past searches and other browser history, which would make avFM’s readers more likely(?) to have violence against men links handy? Since they’re likely to have looked up violence against men stats so that they could instantly dismiss them? Or maybe they just look up violence against women stats to instantly dismiss them. Still, with all the violence against men they talk about, I’d think Google would be able to pick up on that and customize at least a little… But then, going by that logic, maybe they talk about violence against women so often that Google is like “Wow, you need some educating, let me give you all these links about violence against women so you can see what a big problem it is and stfu about your awful fantasies”.
I could be totally wrong about the way Google works, I’m not a scientician.
@hellkell – d’aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwww Biscuit! 🙂
So I wandered over to GWW’s site and choked my way through the post and even some of the comments (and, by the way, I think we need to up the posting rate of cuteness* given what David wades through to bring us these ‘gems of wisdom’ from AVFM and their legion of basement dwellers) and I noticed this bit of projection.
We’re all just figments of David’s imagination, y’all! It can’t possibly be that there is a community of people who share a (I prefer the word “goofy”) sense of humor, love of cats and appreciation for cuteness. Nope, has to be one person with an enormous collection of socks! (Which is hysterical, given the number of times the same troll comes back here socking until they get unmasked and rebanned!)
*My contribution? This adorable foster mama catwith her pit bull baby.
This whole affair gets sadder by the minute.
AVfM, why couldn’t you guys admit you made a mistake, apologize, say you’ll do better next time around, and move on? Nobody would hold that against you, everybody screws up. Sure, you would have been the butt of a couple of jokes, but I guarantee you that the vast majority of people would have forgotten everything pretty quickly. If anything, I believe an honest apology would have made you guys look better!
Oh, but that sort of wisdom would require you being halfway normal, remotely decent people with even the slightest smidgen of self-awareness. Not deceitful, egotistical, self-centered, intentionally ignorant, hateful, David-Futrelle-is-a-mangina-and thus-must-be-destroyed-because-men’s-rights-arglebargle -shouting, frothing-at-the-mouth misogynists who continue to dig deeper to find whole new meanings to the term “toxic masculinity”.
I see. Just forget the whole thing, then.
Ok, this has been bothering me for a while now. Even ignoring the whole screenshot debacle, they seem to be utterly ignorant of how social justice works. They’re right about the fact that violence against men is a huge problem, but they miss the fact that it’s so huge that it’s broken down into subgroups to more effectively address the issue. For example, you have gang violence, police brutality, the military- and prison-industrial complexes, and yes, domestic violence, among others. All of those topics will give you plenty of hits on Google. The idea that “violence against men” isn’t a frequently-searched phrase actually supports their point that it is a much larger, more complex issue than violence against women.
Biscuit’s reaction is the appropriate reaction.
Moar cuteness: I came back here because my friend finally sent me a picture of the little kitty she rescued from the parking lot next to her apartment. Right now they’re calling her “The Houseguest” because they don’t want to get too attached to her, while they try to find her a new home. How would it be possible NOT to get attached to this little furball?
But apparently this is a numbers game, and a zero-sum one at that.
Wait a moment, Gill. You mean you’re NOT a figment of David Futrelle’s imagination?
@quantumscale Unfortunately your (quite valid and excellent) critique begins with a basic logical flaw. You assume that they want to actually DO something about violence against main (in all its many forms and varieties). They don’t. What they want is to use the fact of violence against men to erase social taboos against committing acts of violence against women.
They won’t march against or speak out against war, they just complain that women aren’t eligible to be drafted (ignoring the fact that 1. there is no draft and 2. many women have been pushing hard to get into combat and leadership roles and have been actively prevented from doing so).
They don’t take any actions to help provide services for male victims of domestic violence, they just complain that they can’t punch women who say and do things they don’t like (in fact there is a strong suggestion that the real activist Earl Silverman, who labored for years without any help from his ‘movement’ to provide shelter and assistance for abused men committed suicide in the midst of his despair over the lack of support he was getting).
Take any issue they mention and pick it into it’s components and what you will find is that their take on it boils down to a rhetorical gesture toward a real problem followed by elaborate conspiracy mongering about how it is all the fault of feminists and how the solution is to punish women (or at least those women who hold the wacky idea that they ought to be considered equal before law and society).
@gillyrosebee:
Dave, you already mentioned that quotation. You’re repeating yourself, David. And now you’re telling yourself that you’re repeating yourself. Dave Futrelle.
@gillyrosebee
You’re absolutely right, of course. I don’t know why I keep giving them the benefit of the doubt. And that’s really sad about Earl Silverman.
@Tulgey Logger Must… not… sleep…
Actually, it’s too late for me. My masters have already invaded my brain and taken over my will. If they were able to open the cat food cans themselves, or load the dryer to have warm towels to lay on, they wouldn’t need me, but any aliens who want to make me their slave will have my cats to contend with first!
Omfg cloudiah, that kitten. So cute!! If I was rescuing her she would not leave my house.