So, when we moved into our new place, the front door was very bad? Just, like, an inside door mounted on the outside, warped, with peeling paint, letting in so much cold, and instead of a deadlock just a doorknob lock.

When the doorknob lock started to fully jam, rendering the door unlockable, instead of replacing the knob, we replaced the full door with a whole new frame and insulated steel door for ~$4000 CAD (I’m not a confident enough homeowner to replace a full doorframe on my own, we paid A Guy).

I was away for a week.

Anyways, this is how a cat tells you “I missed you, never leave me again.”

I put a woven mat under my desk and attracted wildlife

He’s learning how to camp with us:

I could swear he looks smug, can cats be smug?

I thought that it would be great to have a chatty cat but 90% of what he has to say are complaints to the management that he is not receiving the level of five star service that he has come to expect from this kind of resort.

like 90% of my camera roll is zapp

for the last few days Zapp has been sitting on my lap for hours each night, which is good for the soul but bad for the productivity

and also the circulation in my legs

I could have done something useful with my evening but playing Balatro with a warm cat in my lap all evening is probably good too

Zapp comes from a genetic line of cats that’s relatively new:

also he is very cute and I love him

The problem with having a very photogenic cat is that my phone fills up quickly with pictures of my very photogenic cat.

I went October camping (widely considered to be a bad idea this deep into the fall) and I was counting on climate change to make it practical - which it did.

actually fall camping is really great, cool and crisp and nice

Meaningfully taking a cat for a walk is a strange project. It’s more of a cat directed meander around the parking lot where mostly you’re keeping him from wandering into other folks’ gardens and you have no say whatsoever in where you are going.

He still wants to go for walks in the rain, but he doesn’t much care for being wet

snug that cute face

sunbeam activate

dude, what?

I love it when he tucks his tail neatly around his legs like this.

So, there’s an episode of Game Changer called “Don’t Cry”.

My first thought upon seeing it was “how are they going to make that work, it’s very easy not to cry”.

…. oh, goddamn, he’s not playing here at all

Ultimately the episode was very sweet, and laser targeted at essentially love bombing a cast member who’d had a tough time, who wept through pretty much the whole episode, and lost/won.

But it made me question my bravado, I’m actually very easy to make cry. Any sad or sweet movie for one.

Look, I know exactly how to utterly wreck myself, I’ll show you, I’ll make myself cry right now:

It’s not that sad a story in the grand scheme of things, but Tiff and I had been wanting a cat forever, and we finally found a landlord who would allow us to get one, just in time for the pandemic to begin.

Long wait list with a local breeder - I’m allergic to cats, but not bengals, so we ended up with this unusually intelligent and busy breed.

Fia.

I fell in love with her immediately.

she was quite the skittish kitten

at first she was terrified of her new home, so I would spend nights in her room with her, getting her used to me, playing with her, until she was content to sit in my lap and purr for a little bit at a time

we set up little milestones around the house and she’d come out and explore, a little bit at first, but she got braver over time.

I was so proud of her.

then she stopped eating.

a terrible disease that strikes kittens.

and before very long at all we had to say goodbye to Fia

this is our last picture of her

i wonder if it’s weird for my cat when I take the small fuzzy creature he’s been chasing for the past few minutes, turn it inside out, and roll it up my foot, like, he’s pretty bloodthirsty but that’s just an insane level of escalation

Sometimes when Zapp is all comfy and asleep I’ll sidle up to him real close and go “Meow! MEOW!” but I don’t think he understands that it’s intended as vengeance

buddy - if you could just - slightly to the - sigh okay

my cat is orange, and he has a white chin and a white belly and a tiger striped tail, and we’re very good friends, and somehow this fulfills a deep-seated itch planted in my brain a very, very long time ago

Just cruise into the living room to discover a fully tucked cat, he did this himself.

In case you’re wondering if I’m staging all of these photos where Zapp is nestled in some comfy part of the house: not all of ’em, he loves a blanket.

I’m feeling a little sick so my bud is helping out

having a bengal is a fine way to experience being very gently eviscerated by your best friend

So, I caught a cold and instead of doing anything useful or productive I shotgunned 30 full hours of Steven Universe in an embarrassingly short timespan.

I barely feel any guilt about this: one of the luxuries about having a cold is that it’s one of the only times in my life I can ever just exist without stressing about my productivity, even more so than during a vacation. Even with the headache and the soreness sometimes I welcome these rare colds (not COVID though, that fucked me up).

Now I’m sad that it’s over. It hurts to extricate yourself from a deep dive like this when you’re really attached to a piece of media. It’s over, time to put it away for another couple of years.

I remember feeling exactly this same way when I was a tween at the end of my favourite books.

One of the reasons I’ve always wanted to write or draw fiction is this effect: I want to be able to induce this state in myself, create a wellspring that never runs dry.

… but it doesn’t work that way. It’s like tickling yourself, it just doesn’t work, and you spend so much longer with each moment that it completely wears out any emotion or humor.

“you guys, I think I heard some birds out there”

I’ve set up a new cat zone right next to my work computer with the softest blanket on it, and despite this being the third cat bed in my office and maybe the seventh in the whole house, it’s his new favorite.

just pictures of this cat living his best life make me happy to look at

Tiff is out of town for a few days, which is emotionally devastating for our cat:

Your path is blocked! Can you defeat the giant monster, brave adventurers?

Lo, the monster has been defeated with ear rubs

a story in four parts

zapp is so sweet, when I’ve pet him too much, no bites, he’ll just put a paw on top of my hand, like “stop”

Bengal cats are an unusually intelligent, active, and difficult breed of cat, not recommended for first time cat owners. They require a lot of attention and play, and can be destructive if bored. They are not lap cats and they won’t be as affectionate as more domesticated cats.

That being said, if you do have the massive amount of time to invest into becoming besties with a l’il leopard cat, you get the positive sides of their intelligence and playfulness and chattiness and bossiness.

Also the secret to unlocking leopard snuggles are “finding the blanket with the texture they like”, “Canadian winters” and “a drafty ol townhouse house built in the 70s”

me: 37 years old

secretly, in my head, all the time:

places where cat shouldn’t be:

places where cat should be:

I always wonder how pets conceptualize human abilities, like, these soft magic giants can make it warm and bright… but they can’t do it out THERE?

do it out THERE I want to PEE and it’s COLD

I don’t think that Zapp is necessarily the direct inspiration for VRChat’s VRCat, but he joined our family in September of 2020 just while we were all crunching on VRChat+, I posted a LOT of adorable pictures to the work Slack, and VRChat+ shipped that Christmas, it’s definitely possible that I helped to establish the idea of “cat” firmly in the team’s head.

An instance of the much-vaunted tail-wrap caught in the wild:

Look at this mug

So, imagine Back to the Future, but Biff Tannen has to watch Marty from inside his house the entire time, and he spends the entire movie in there yelling “I’m gonna bully you so hard if I ever get out of here” and making threatening gestures out the window, and sometimes he gets so angry that Marty is outside not getting bullied that he pees against a wall

anyways that’s what it’s like owning a bengal cat

pictured, Zapp when he sees another cat chilling harmlessly and enjoying themselves, hundreds of yards away:

When his bloodlust vis-a-vis the concept of other cats subsides, he’s super sweet

“Why are all of your pictures of Zapp when he’s sleepy and snuggly?”

because when he’s feeling playful all of the pictures look like this:

When I was a kid I had Australian shepherds and I love that bengals have that kind of energy and intelligence, but that also makes them challenging (but rewarding) pets.

long

as a kid I always dreamed of graphs, and charts, and DOS, and more and better computer technology

and now as an adult I’m just fascinated with cookies, and this adorable little kitty who wants to play with me and sit quietly and form a happy warm ball in my lap

which feels a little backwards, but I’ll accept it

Pfft, your house is on solar? Pitiful, I have something much more powerful.

This is primarily a cat posting account with periodic breaks for everything else I do

you walk into a clearing, roll for initiative

one of the greatest things about cats is that they’re, like, some of the most terrifying and prolific murderers in the animal kingdom, they retain 100% of those killer instincts, but we’re so much bigger than them that we can pick them up and call them “mr. stinky” and snuggle them and there’s nothing they can do about it

he’s the hero this bathroom deserves

oh hai what’s up

(cronch)

Zapp is a very cute adult cat, but he was weapons grade adorable as a kitten.

attn: cat would like to outside:

computer

Ok, if you want to go outside so badly, let’s give it a try!

…

ok, fresh problem, now you want to be outside all of the time

I am fortunate that Zapp is smart but not very heavy

c’mon trust me I won’t bite you again promise

ha ha u fell for it

Packing? No, we’re just making loads of new cat beds.

there aren’t a lot of cat gargoyles but there should be, wouldn’t buildings be better with a whole mess of stone cats napping all over the place, watching you from cornerso

isn’t this building better for having this guy?

• keep themselves immaculately coiffed
• recreationally do murders for the sheer thrill of the hunt
• sometimes very friendly, sometimes very cold
• sleep all day
• prominent fangs
• will hiss at you dramatically if threatened
• even if they love you, they will bite you if they get too excited, they can’t help it
• mweh!

evidence is mounting that vampires and cats are beloved for many of the same reasons

basically I’m laying out the argument for why “Prince Alastair: Catboy Vampire” would be the most shipped character ever written

Cats treat dogs basically the same way that vampires treat werewolves, I’m telling you, vampires is just cats.

Do you know that part of Castlevania where Dracula dramatically throws a wine glass on to the ground and it shatters?

Total cat move.

Comfy behind the TV, buddy?

He turns his head upside down when he sees me so I can give him some chin snugs

This look means my toes are in danger.

Sometimes you wake up and there’s a lump of covers next to you that you need to investigate and you find a cat in there.

cat trap succeess

Obviously: cat pics