I’m sorry I might sound like a madwoman for going on a rant about this but man, it’s… I don’t know how to express it but just the thought of some person, 120 years ago, taking a photo of their cat, which back then wasn’t easy – they didn’t have phones with cameras, each photo required a lot of time and dedication, so not only the person “wasted” a whole photo on their cat, they also did their fricking best to save this photo and carefully put it into an envelope to preserve it so that people in the future will know that there was this cat and it looked like this and it’s owner thought the cat looked lovely that day so much that they decided to take a photo of it and then they loved the photo so much that they went out of their way to preserve it for future generations like “hello people from the future! this is what my cat loos like!” because they loved their cat so much they wanted people from the future to know about it is… crazy to me… and here we are, 120 years later, long after the cat and it’s owners passed away, looking at an old photo of a cat and gushing about it. The cat died so long ago and wouldn’t even know it existed if not for the owner that loved their cat so much that they decided this photo was worth preserving and put it into a time capsule. and seeing now how people dedicate whole blogs to their cats and take countless pictures of them just to show to other people really hits because you realize that in the end, people from today aren’t that much different from people that were 120 years ago. We all just love our cats and want people to look at them.
I bet this woman was imagining the photo may be seen by like… a family some day. But no. It survived till the age of the internet. It has now transcended the original media. It is now being seen by far more eyes in far more places than the media she chose would normally allow.
I hope the taker of this 120 year old photo is PROUD.
I feel it’s worth pointing out that the thing in the time capsule isn’t a photograph – it’s a glass-plate negative.
For those unfamiliar with non-digital photography, how it works is when you take a photo, what you’re doing is exposing a transparent medium that’s been treated with a light-sensitive chemical that darkens when exposed to light. This results in a negative image of whatever you’re photographing: dark where the light was bright, and transparent where the light was dim. The negative is then treated with a fixative chemical that renders it insensitive to further light exposure, and the actual photograph is produced by shining a bright light through the fixed negative and onto a sheet of paper treated with the same light-sensitive chemical. In this way, a single negative can be used to produce many copies of the same photograph. This is the process shown in the video.
In other words, the person who stored the time capsule away didn’t preserve a photo of their cat: they preserved the tools necessary to mass produce photos of their cat. It’s not unreasonable to suppose they did, in fact, hope that many copies of it would be made – though they probably did not anticipate exactly how many there would be!
At least, she appears to. I am no theologian. God, in her infinite majesty and power, is beyond canine comprehension. Her glory is ever ancient, ever new. Perhaps her apparent new smell is merely an artefact of my own perception. God changes her fur into new fur every day, and sometimes even has no fur at all when she is in the Realm Of Wet, but she is always the same God. But these last few months, God has smelled different. Her voice sounds higher. Her touch is softer. And when she speaks to the other Gods, in the inimitable divine tongue, they seem to refer to her with a new name.
(I say she: The Gods, of course, transcend our simple canine categories of male and female, but she smells female now. Perhaps this is a lesson to show me the true boundlessness of God – the Gods do not fit into the little boxes our minds can understand. But then again, it is beyond me to guess at God’s will.)
Since I became a follower of my God, I have always known that my God is the best and greatest of all the Gods. All the Gods are powerful; not all the Gods are loving. I was born in the world of Gods who were… less merciful than she is. Of course, it is hard for us to fully understand the depths of our own sinfulness. Perhaps when they left me alone in the yard for days, it was intended for my spiritual growth. Perhaps when they hit me, it was only to give me the chance to learn virtue. Perhaps when my old Gods zipped me up in a holdall and cast me out it was divine justice. I mean, I peed on the rug all the time and I was always whining when they didn’t take me for walks – do I really deserve to live?
I confess that when she became my God, I feared her divine justice. In my sin and foolishness, I had come to believe that the gods were only a source of pain. I moved from her hands, fearing she would hit me. In my unloveliness I fell upon the lovely toys she had given me. She was with me; I was not with her. And yet she asked me “Who is a good boy?” and broke through my deafness; she shone the holy light of her laser pointer and broke through my blindness; she petted me and I burned for her peace. I see the others at the dog park with their Gods and I know that my God is the greatest God of all. No other God is like her.
I know I am unworthy of the mercy, the salvation that my God has offered me. Perhaps it was my sins that caused her to weep so much in the past, to be so afraid to the other gods, to lie in her resting place for hours without moving, staring into empty space. Yet my God always showed me joy when I came to her. When I buried my face in her body, her weeping always ended. When I asked her to walk me, she always answered my prayer. Perhaps, indeed, it is a sin to imagine that my own sins are the cause of her weeping: how can I understand the mind of God?
But since my God got her new smell, the weeping happens less. She laughs more. She does not lie for so long in her bed. And I do not even need to pray in order for her to take me on walks. It would be blasphemous to say that I can know the thoughts of the divine, and yet I cannot escape the feeling: my God seems happier. And God has chosen, in her generosity, to share this beautiful new happiness with me.
The indescribable depths of divine generosity are, presumably, how she manages to tolerate the cat.
I’ve noticed the servant smells a little different these days. Moping less, too – which is good. This one is very sweet and I am pretty attached to her, in spite of myself. She does still keep trying to get me to eat that dry food, but I’m firm with her and after enough meows she usually gets the message and gives me a proper meal. You just have to stand your ground with servants – make sure they know who’s boss. Treat them nicely, but not too nicely.
I know one shouldn’t get too attached to one’s servants. When my last servant died, it really got to me. He was very affectionate, and never even attempted this dry food nonsense. But he was very, very old. I know that humans have very long lifespans – but not forever. I really shouldn’t have let him become so dear to me. It was… when I found him cold in his bed that morning, and it became clear he wasn’t waking up, it was a very nasty shock. I still have nightmares about it.
When I found my new servant, I told myself “don’t let yourself get too close to this one. You never know what might happen.” But, well, what can I say. I’m soft-hearted. She’s a hard-working girl, cleans the litter box promptly, doesn’t skimp on the treats, handy with a laser pointer. And when I got here, she always seemed so sad. I don’t know what happened to her but, well, I missed my own servant, and I understood what pain is like. So I’d snuggle up to her when she was lying in bed – which she did a lot, just staring into space and moping. I mean, it was a warm place to sleep. But also, it seemed to help her a little bit.
Since she got the new smell though, she seems better. Making those weird little human noises they make when they’re happy. Mixing more with the other humans. Smiling. It’s quite cute, honestly. And – you know, she’s young. She seems healthy enough. Maybe it’s not so terrible to be a little bit attached to this one.
She’s not perfect. It’s going to take a while to train her out of this dry food habit. But she’s a good girl, all in all. I’m glad she seems happier these days.
Don’t understand why she still insists on keeping that dog around though.
I often wonder what my pets have named me. Humans are a visual species and like to name our pets based on their aspect or colour, so I think my dog with his smell-based worldview would come up with a smell name. I imagine something cute and cheerful and a little over the top in a dog way, like Applefriend Cake, because my laundry product gives my clothes a sweet, slightly apple-y smell which might remind Pandolf of happy memories of tasting cake crumbs. Unless he was feeling serious the day he named me, and basing himself on the fact that I read a lot and my hands often smell like book pages when I pet him, and went with something more decorous that translates to Paperdust Pal. Cat naming conventions are more enigmatic since they are less preoccupied with human affairs. My catgiven name was probably the result of a secret ballot vote among my cats, who decided upon something that resonates with cat history and heritage—a dated, unfashionable name if they felt a duty to honour one of their ancestors or if I’m lucky, a mythological figure from cat lore.
this is such a good post now i want to know what the cat i live with calls me
Happy Caturday! Christmas tree season is fast approaching. We know that for some of you it’s already here. Your cats are looking forward to it too, though perhaps not for the same reasons. They’re less interested in festive ambiance and presents than pawing at shiny ornaments, pulling off the garlands and lights, and climbing that tree like it’s their own sparkly, evergreen fort.
Bored Panda assembled an awesome collection of creatively pet-proofed Christmas trees. These photos are just the tip of the very merry iceberg.
Rejected SCP Object proposal #137: a housecat that has an unerring ability to locate and navigate to the nearest SCP Foundation containment facility. Once it arrives, it makes every reasonable effort to get inside. It has no other observably anomalous properties or behaviours – it just really, really wants to be inside the containment facility.
It is in large part inspired by the situation with Max the cat and the DeWitt Wallace Library, yes, but it’s also a sort of thought experiment: what is the most disarmingly innocuous anomaly we can come up with that would nonetheless give the Foundation the screaming willies?
This one has a couple of features that help it along there:
The cat’s existence is inherently an informational security breach, since – if left to its own devices – it can always find the nearest SCP Foundation containment facility without outside assistance. Imagine if some hostile third party got their hands on it!
The fact that its anomalous properties specifically target Foundation facilities suggests either that it was created purposefully, or else that it’s a byproduct of some other anomaly already in containment, and they have no idea which of those it is and no ready means of learning more.
In the containment log in my head, the cat’s existence was known for several years prior to its containment, but it was believed at the time to be an ordinary cat with a weird fixation on that particular building. After the site was closed down due to administrative reshuffling, the cat showed up at the next-nearest site a few weeks later and was recognised by transferred staff, at which point they realised something might be amiss – and upon testing and confirmation, were confronted with the fact that they’d had an uncontained and likely deliberately crafted anomaly nosing around one of their sites for several years.
Brinens and Things 