The dog ate so much poop on our evening walk that we only gave her half her dinner, and now we wait to see how bad her tummy will be tonight. It’s really hard when you’ve got deer and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes and a million other critters all pooping away around the house, and a dog who dearly loves to chow on poop. It’s just impossible to keep her away from it.
It really should make me love her less. It’s truly foul. I use my stern voice when I see her eating, and that’s the sign that she should do the bad thing faster.
The nightmare has happened, but without any bad result: Max, my father’s dog ran right in front of a car. The car stopped fortunately. He’s quite intelligent but he has no understanding of the danger of cars.
Scary. So glad he’s OK. This used to be my biggest fear until we moved to the ass end of a long dirt road. Now, my biggest worry is that our dog will chase and corner a rattlesnake. She’s had the rattlesnake vaccine, so we have a little extra time to get her to the vet if she tangles with one. She’s had encounters with a skunk and a porcupine, but luckily both were on the other side of the fence, so they weren’t as bad as they could have been. But she hasn’t had a serious snake encounter yet, and I dread it.
This might be a bit of a silly idea- but would it be possible to train her to be recalled or to independently relocate away from a snake? They sell toy snakes (I’m thinking of the wooden segmented ones that clack), and maybe that might help. Though, if she’s an outdoor dog or just a hunting breed, I imagine it’s pretty tough.
Theoretically this is possible. In reality, snake aversion training takes a lot of time and effort and is generally achieved best with a shock collar, and even then it’s not 100% because something moving through the grass is just. so. fascinating, and it could be a mouse or a lizard or a snake or a stick blown by the wind.
Our fence keeps out most of the things, like skunks, that can cause serious problems, but those slender and self-important snakes just think they own everything and go everywhere they like, even her fenced area where she’s supposed to be able to hang out on her own.
Luckily, rattlers are anti-social. The black rat snakes feel like they own our porch, but the rattlers generally stick to the pasture and the ravine, and she’s pretty well trained not to go there on her own.
I was gonna make a one room with slinky (my cat) to practice TADS but I didn’t get far because parsers are more writing than I’m used to xD it was gonna be an exercise in writing Actors
I often think about writing a game from the perspective of a rabbit I used to have, who was abandoned, injured and pregnant, on the streets of Brooklyn. We adopted her and one of her babies, the one who was too shy to leave her side, and she was the sweetest creature alive. Every day she would jump up on the couch in the morning and evening to be petted, even when jumping became harder for her.
We still have her son, and he’s slowly, slowly gotten more outgoing. We couldn’t pet him for 4-5 years, then he’d let us pet him when his mom was nearby, and eventually he started tolerating it when she wasn’t around. But since she left us, he’s become almost as friendly as she was. He always wants to know what we’re doing, and even though he doesn’t demand petting like she did, he does ask nicely sometimes. I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me six years ago.
I’m planning to write a game starring my dear departed rats! From left to right: Puck, Royal, and Quince. They had such distinct personalities, and I’m planning for the game to involve switching between them to use their different strengths for different tasks. (Plug for rats as pets: they are absolutely the best. I adore them so much. )
Being a crazy cat person, if I were to make a game with a pet protagonist, I’d immediately think of cats. But I think that to be true to cat nature, if one were making a game with a cat protagonist, 90% of the time the player’s command would be ignored, for gameplay like:
>go north
You lick your nethers.
Cat tax for indirect mention of cat: my fuzzbutt, Inky.
As a crazy dog person, I think to be true to dog nature in a game, it would look something like:
GO NORTH
But this is the kitchen and we haven’t licked the ENTIRE floor yet. Plus, my person is here and I have to be at his feet. Something’s up with my butt! Turn around 3 times but can’t reach it. Now I barf up that grass I ate earlier. Wait, what’s happening?
I’ve already shared photos of my pet doves in another post, but today I stumbled upon a picture of an old pet that I wanted to honour: the one who served as the model for my profile icon!
He doesn’t really have a name, as I was keeping about a dozen identical beetles at the time and I could never tell them apart. But they were all special to me
He had only just emerged from his pupa and become an adult when I took this shot, and I was fascinated by his colours. He was still all soft and looked like a tiny Siamese cat (with a hilariously angry face). His wings can even be seen folded up under the translucent elytra!
Very soon after, he was already hardening up and getting more pigmentation:
Although there’s still some debate in the scientific world over the sentience of insects, the available evidence was more than enough for me to err on the side of caution and treat these darkling beetles as I would any other animal. I found them to be very gentle and goofy bugs, and they still have a special place in my heart — and somehow they ended up becoming the face and name of several of my online accounts.
Photos of other life stages, for my fellow bug-lovers or anyone curious
Oooh, beetles. Pretty. We are so fortunate that one of the most common local beetles here is the figeater beetle, which is a large, gorgeous, iridescent green guy. They are also the reason why our peach trees never produce any edible peaches-- the figeaters bore big holes in every peach before we can get to them. But they’re just so lovely, like little jewels, so I don’t particularly begrudge them the peaches, which I’m not going to spray with poison. It kind of balances out the truly scary bugs we have here.
)
