Open thread for personal stuff, like if there’s a cat always sitting on you

If I’m not in my office (no kitties allowed) or otherwise occupied, more often than not, I have one of the kittyboys (or both) sitting on me. There’s a reason we affectionately call them “couch barnacles.”

We’ve had the kittyboys for a little over a year now and I’m loving having two (I’ve never had more than one at a time before.)

Mr. Mistofelees (not named by us) is almost nine and a sleek black Oriental Shorthair mix. He was a closet cat at his last abode due to there being too many other cats, three dogs, and three humans, two of whom didn’t get along. He lived in our closet for around three weeks after we brought him home before he came out. Now he’s happily living in the rest of the house (except for MILbeast’s room.)

Mr. Jones (full name Desmond Thomas O’Malley-Jones) will be two soon. He’s an American Shorthair mix who’s orange tabby/white. He loves everybody and isn’t afraid of anything and likes to lounge around lying on his back, exposing his very foofy white tum. He’s our big goofball and Husbeast is his favorite person.

When MILbeast came to live with us earlier this year, Desmond claimed her room as his and won’t let Stoffy come in. So Stoffy will sit in the hallway and taunt Desmond so that he has to remain vigilant instead of looking out the window or sitting on MILbeast as he’d prefer.

Did I mention that I love having two cats?

@Rabid Rabbit
Indeed, it’s a very good point regarding Junge’s journal.

This was a while ago, so I have to admit it didn’t occur to me to point out that women have to read rape scenes quite often, so it was only fair that we should have to for a change.

Exactly, I think much fewer writers would add egregious depictions of the subject if they were asked to go into just as much detail for male characters being assaulted.

I do know of one war movie that does bring up sexual violence against men, but that’s also in WW1, with Lawrence of Arabia, but there it was only implied and nothing was shown or said outright, but I do think that’s a far more respectful approach than showing too much, and thus easily becoming exploitative, and the movie did not shy away from the horror of the situation nor in showing the consequences of it.

@Fabe, epitome of incomprehensibility
Thank you, glad you both liked it! I do’t have any webcomic of my own, but I have created a few short point and click adventure games where I’ve made the graphics and dialogues myself (most of them I made exactly because I wanted to see at least something that could pass my test) and I could link to that page in case anyone here is interested.

About my reply in the other thread – you were talking about historical war stories specifically, so my mention of sci-fi was pretty off topic. Sorry about that!

No problem, and I think it’s only fine if people want to apply my test to other genres, the main reason I’ve talked about WW2 though is that for all the problematic tropes in sci-fi and fantasy, at least there is some improvement and people questioning sexist writing in them, but with period pieces and historical fiction, I think far too many people just throw their hands in the air and accept it out of some misplaced sense of “realism” (Terrible Writing Advice summed it up pretty well), despite the fact that there actually existed countless women in real-life who weren’t victimized or waiting in the sidelines, and had lives just as interesting and inspiring as any of the male war heroes you see in tons of books, movies and video games. What really changed my perception was The unwomanly face of war by Noble price winner Svetlana Aleksijevitj, which was full of interviews of female war veterans with stories unlike what I’d seen in all warmovies, and I very much recommend it to anyone wanting to see a different side of history that isn’t shown in mainstream depictions of WW2.

@S.P.

Sorry about how that went. I definitely second the advice opposablethumbs gave, if you haven’t already. Sometimes it’s literally just a person in HR missing seeing an email, or going on an unscheduled vacation and the others don’t have time to pick up their slack.

It’s worth a call, or an email, just to check.

Like, I got offered a job and had to do some background checks and had COMPLETE radio silence from the employer for 89 long, long, long days of worrying if my credit hadn’t been good enough or my job history was too confusing or…

If they continue to ghost you, after you try and get in touch, than they are a sucky employer to be avoided, and their communication problems probably impact people who work for them negatively.

I’m sorry for your job hunt struggles. Job hunting sucks, and is scary, and I hope you land the perfect job for yourself soon.

@Lainy: EXACTLY. Two more days. I can survive one more sleepless night, one day of working like a squirrel overdosed on caffeine, maaaaybe.

Maaaaaaaaaybe.

I wanted to share that an artist/dancer is raising a fund for trans writers in Canada: https://twitter.com/RMNarrative/status/1114920681874120707

I was just reading something from a writer I like, Gwen Benaway, who just lost a job due to anti-trans discrimination. Life is tough enough without having to deal with shit like that.

(I was in touch with him and can confirm that it’s a real thing, in case anyone wonders. You can also contact him on Twitter if you want more details; he’s pretty good about answering.)

@rv97 – Maybe this is just me being anxious about things, but please don’t hurt yourself. Yeah, it doesn’t seem like individuals can do much, but it’s not nothing. You’re worth more than the “repressive right” think. <3

@Nequam
Happy wedding anniversary! May you and your beloved enjoy many, many more.

@S. P.
That sounds awful. I like the advice other Mammotheers have given you. Best of luck, whether this organization hires you or you continue your job search.

We call it being “catted.”

“Can you get me some tea? I’m catted.”

“I was folding the clothes but then I got catted so that’s why they’re not done.”

@WWTH

Talked my Grandad into going by flat out telling him that he was getting forgetful and probably needed some vitamins or something since he was a horrible cook (after Nan died, he basically lived on chips and baked beans when one of us didn’t do for him – usually my cousin). Probably won’t work on your mother – Grandad had a working man’s reverence for medicine – but I’m telling you that it’s OK to lie as needed.

There’s not a whole lot can be done about it if she is in the early stages – it will progress as it wishes, though some things seem to slow it’s progress very, very slightly.

With that said – you will need to know if she is actually in the early stages. She might not benefit from knowing – it’s a hell of a diagnosis to stare down the barrel of and she might be happier simply not knowing. It’s a hard call.

Sorry for you – it is a rough thing to have to deal with.

If I’m here less than normal lately, it’s because I’m having issues with my install of Firefox. I’m not sure how it started (probably wasn’t an update, since it started in mid-session without a restart immediately preceding symptoms). But last night around midnight it suddenly crapped out big-time: all my extensions disappeared, and someone (not me) logged me out of Facebook and closed my Facebook tab. I tried restarting it a couple of times but whatever “they” did apparently was persisted to disk as it would not work correctly. Without security stuff like uBlock and NoScript it’s not safe to surf, so I could not use it.

This morning it was not working before breakfast but oddly my extensions were back to normal when I tried it again after. But the Facebook tab was still missing. I created a new one but the browser’s been bedeviled with problems all morning: frequent freezes (sometimes I can close the problem tab, sometimes have to restart the browser) at Facebook, videos and animated GIFs not working at Facebook, and at least some weirdness with WHTM — in particular, one time when I was scrolling here it got “stuck” somehow for a few seconds, and when I finally got it “unstuck” with enough frantic mousing, all the avatars disappeared next to everyone’s names. Reloading made the avatars return, but all in all this is very disturbing.

I’d hate to have to go through the rigmarole of uninstalling and reinstalling it and recreating all of my settings and stuff, so does anyone know of a less drastic way to restore it to normal — or have a frigging clue what the hell happened to begin with? I can’t identify a precipitating action on my own part — I just switched to another task for a bit last night, then when I switched back the add-ons had all vanished, along with my Facebook tab (I only discovered later when recreating it that I’d also been logged out by someone), starting the ball rolling on all the subsequent screwiness.

It looks disturbingly like I got hacked, but aside from the flaky browser behavior there’s no apparent damage. On the other hand, how could it be a bug? a) I didn’t do anything to cause hypothetical new, buggy code to begin running, such as installing anything or restarting the browser (it usually auto-updates when restarted, if there are any updates available), and b) what kind of bug takes actions on your behalf like clicking logout links and closing tabs? Some of this stuff seems like a “gain of function mutation” which is hard to explain. I suppose an auto-update to an add-on could cause some of the symptoms, but obliterating all the other add-ons as well as itself? And then causing persistent problems after its own self-removal?

In any event, if anyone here knows any of the following I’d appreciate any information you might have:

1. How to restore the browser to normal non-glitchy behavior. In particular, no hiccups and freezes, animations and videos working again, avatars not disappearing, etc.

2. How to prevent this from ever happening to me again. Some setting to lock down to protect the browser from unauthorized modification by 3rd parties? I could I suppose change it to only notify me of updates but I don’t think the update mechanism was responsible so I doubt that would work.

My point being, nobody should be able to intrude into my home and disrupt my use of my electronics without first knocking politely on the door and presenting a warrant issued upon probable cause and signed by a judge of competent jurisdiction. I am getting mighty tired of a wide assortment of third parties intruding in various ways into my home and disrupting my activities therein, without an invitation of any kind from me. It’s high time I started enforcing my right to be safe and undisturbed in my own home absent a court order. The last time I checked we are still supposed to have rule of law in Canada, right? So how do I obtain the benefits of that, since for some odd reason that does not seem to be happening automatically the way it should …

I’m suspicious of this non-explanation. An “issue in Firefox”? How did my copy suddenly grow a new bug while I was doing other things and not, in particular, applying updates or restarting it?

The obvious implication is that there’s a remote kill-switch in the browser that some idiot flipped. One that bypasses the normal update mechanism, as apparently the “fix” also does.

Why would they include a kill-switch? How much other technology that we own has kill-switches that are undisclosed to us, or disclosed only in some fine print somewhere? And who has their hands on these switches? Given current events, it’s not just cack-handed idiots we need to worry about. It’s also authoritarian governments. Are the very tools that we, as a resistance, would use to organize compromised already? If a latter-day Hitler came to power in the US tomorrow, could he just send a few brownshirts to Firefox HQ to put guns to people’s heads and turn off security software everyone uses? What else could be done from there? Remotely activated surveillance, perhaps? This is even worse with cloud services such as Facebook but these events make clear that even software that is supposed to be “ours” running on our “local” boxen is apparently still often invisibly tied to the manufacturer, and can be silently changed by that manufacturer. And even supposedly open source stuff can’t be trusted by the end-user!

It’s not just future despotic governments we should be concerned about either, but present ones. So much of our hardware is built in China. How much of it has been backdoored? Can Xi Jinping wake up tomorrow morning, push a button, and spy on you out of your “Made in China” webcam? Go into your router and quietly enable Great Firewall censorship on it, maybe even a piece at a time so nobody notices what’s happening, boiling-frog style? Turn off key systems used by Allied command and control, vehicles, weapons, and so forth as a first strike prelude to invasion, even? Or just crash work computers en masse, crash the machines running stock trading algorithms, crash the systems at telecom hubs and power companies, and send everyone else back to the Stone Age like the villains in Live Free or Die Hard?

And like any other network-exposed feature, any such backdoor might be used by other than the intended user. If Xi Jinping can do it with a push of a button, so can a Russian or North Korean hacker, for profit or just for the lulz.

What if tomorrow all the Firefox extensions fail again and this time it’s accompanied by a ransom note?

How do we defend ourselves against this systemic risk? The only sensible answer is to go aggressively open source, and to avoid monocultures since a widely used monoculture open source thing, like Firefox, is demonstrably vulnerable to screwups or attacks aimed at its HQ.

That means we need hardware made in a diversity of places by a diversity of manufacturers bound together only by a common specification — not highly proprietary hardware (Apple) or hardware that has sixty thousand different branding labels but all ultimately comes from the same single factory near Shanghai. And it means we need software that is explicitly designed to not have any single central points of control where it can be modified, switched off, or the like. Everything being able to auto-update seems convenient, until you realize that even if you trust the guy sitting behind the desk where those updates come from today, you might not be able to trust whoever will be sitting there a week from now. And nothing should have a remote kill switch except strategic weapons of war.

Any centralized ability to shut off or subvert technology you use WILL be used by a future despot to try to rapidly consolidate power, or by a future enemy in war to try to achieve a swift victory, perhaps without firing a shot. And it CAN be used by the criminal element to extort you in the meantime. That includes both hackers and the vendor, if in the future they get sufficiently desperate for liquidity and/or just plain sufficiently unscrupulous.

Is this something that should be a much bigger political issue than it currently is? Is someone intentionally keeping it from getting the attention it deserves, in much the way the wealthy oligarchs who own most of the big media companies induce them not to talk much about things like building public housing to solve the affordability crisis, or pretty much any perspective much to the left of the center-right?

Or you can disable automatic updates and then you won’t have to worry about it updating itself. But what do I know, I’m just a web developer. 😉

@Lainy
Oh no! Is it because of creepy dude?