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etraytin · 4 years

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Quarantine, Day 134

July 23

The kitten room feels so empty tonight! For the past month or so I've been journaling from in here while keeping one eye on the boys' nightly rampage, occasionally taking breaks to stop them from bouncing off walls or to dangle the cat dancer for them. But this afternoon I packed them up and took them back to the shelter where they will go on to big kitten finishing school before going up for adoption. My kitten room is quiet and peaceful, perfect for tiny neonates who need lots of sleep and cuddles in order to grow, but not exactly the best environment from which to dump two scared not-quite-feral-anymores into the controlled chaos of the kitten room at the shelter. It is frustrating that the rescue coordinator cannot see the difference in them from six weeks ago because they are still so scared when they go into the shelter, but I am hoping that spending a couple weeks in the different and much more fluid environment of big kitten foster will help them adjust better. They are so sweet, they're just scared of change!

With the kittens off to their next adventure, our attention turns to getting ready for the trip. Tonight I need to clean up the kitten room, both because it will get extremely stinky and gross if I just leave it for ten days and because I know that as soon as I get back they're going to give me new kittens. There are so many kittens, y'all! We knew it was going to be like this all the way back in March when the spay-neuter clinic had to close down and our trapping was curtailed by health concerns and curfew. Still, you just have to do what you can! Our numbers this month are good so far, even with a full week left to go. We've TNR'd 15 adult cats, put 17 kittens into foster, and only had to euthanize one sick and suffering cat. We also raised nearly enough money to cover our own costs for the month, which is very important! The rescue operates on a thin margin at the best of times, but with adoptions down and intakes up, they can't afford to kick a lot of cash our way for surgeries. Getting money from the people who ask us to catch cats for them helps some, but we don't not help cats just because somebody can't pay. So far our best vehicle for fundraising has been finding the very photogenic kitties and telling their stories to Facebook with the donate button activated. People do like to help sad kitties, thank god!

Besides cleaning the kitten room, I also need to get the kitchen and bathrooms clean so nothing unpleasant grows while we are away, and clean out the van so we can fill it with stuff to take with us. We still haven't gotten that bookshelf out because it rained this afternoon. So lots of cleaning, packing suitcases (my husband did all the laundry because he is a generally amazing person), getting the plants set up for slow watering, and making food for the trip is all on the agenda for tomorrow. Plus it's our anniversary, which is at least an excellent excuse for takeout and not dirtying up the kitchen. Also it is the cat's birthday! She is officially old enough to drive now, so be careful out there!

In lieu of watching the kittens wrestle while I write, I'm keeping an eye on the local Facebook group melting down over the school board task force recommendation that the first nine weeks of school be all-virtual. You can definitely tell who in the comments has never even visited an elementary school since their own student years. It's an interesting mix of people concerned about spreading the virus in schools, people concerned about the logistical nightmare of social distancing in schools, people who are so desperate to get their kids back into school (for a variety of reasons) that they would risk just about anything, and a smattering of people insisting that this is all a hoax and that somehow Nancy Pelosi is winning if we keep schools closed (???) The Pelosi part just seems to be one guy who is posting a whole lot.

I put in my two cents and bowed out, which is that if they open the schools they are just going to have to close them again as soon as they run out of teachers. Even assuming that every teacher is willing to go back and that anybody who can retire or afford to quit doesn't bounce at the last minute, COVID-19 exposure requires a two week family quarantine. If the teacher gets exposed, or if one of their kids gets exposed, that's a teacher out for 14 days, which is a nightmare sub scenario in normal times. The division says they have 350 subs, but nobody sent me a survey along with my "welcome to 2020, substitute teacher!" letter to ask if I was actually planning to teach. My answer, and I suspect the answer of a lot of subs, is no. And real talk, last year I could've subbed all day every day if I had wanted to, because there were never enough subs to cover every spot even in good times. How many teachers do you lose with no available replacement before you have to close a school and not even teach virtually?

Oh, and the other cat thing I did today was dropping off the drop trap (ha!) at a new site to get the cats there trap-trained. Trap training is great if you can manage it, set up the trap and prop it so it stays open, then start feeding the cat in there for several days in a row. The cat gets over their jitters about the trap and gets used to the food being there, so when you actually set the trap to catch them, they walk right in. This time we are trying to catch a mama and two half-grown kittens and we are hoping to get them all in a single drop. This lady whose house I was at was very nice and clearly very affluent, and she is paying the freight for all three cats which is great. She showed me what happened to her TNR cat from a few years ago, who was TNRed as a kitten and then lived in her garage over the winter because it was cold but she was still pretty feral. They decided they could not keep her in the house because she didn't get along with their dog, so they basically built her an efficiency apartment out of half the backyard shed. This thing is an insulated room with lights, air conditioning, television, a heated cat bed, a cat tree, and a little cat door leading out to a screened-in catio. They put an antenna on the shed so the cat could get more channels, and there is a comfy human chair so they can spend time with her. I felt all the feelings simultaneously and elected to settle on being happy that this cat obviously has a super excellent life, and that the humans are taking care of their other feral cats, probably dumpees from the nearby trailer campground.

All right, I've dawdled enough for one night, time to actually get some work done. Oh, and in one last bit of COVID trivia, only one urgent care chain on the Peninsula is giving tests for people without symptoms, and their turnaround time is 7-10 days. That's a pretty good indication that whatever our infection rate is, we actually have no idea how many people have got this thing.

#quarantine #feral kittens #back to school #tnr

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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I know you dont watch GoT anymore. And that Braime and Sansa are your favorites. But I know you've read the books and are obviously really interested in the story. And I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the whole Jon killing Dany thing? Is that something you can see happening in the books? And if it is do you think it'd be in the same context as the show did it?

Ahaha, welp. Just jumping right in there.

(Also, you never have to apologise for asking GOT/ASOIAF questions. I obviously have been a fan for 16 years and wrote fuckin’ TNR with its half-million-plus words, so I clearly do have Thoughts on the story/characters, especially with the bag of lukewarm cat vomit that was s8 of the show.)

I already answered this ask discussing how much I hated the Mad Queen Dany thing, both because a) it was horrifically badly handled and b) these mediocre misogynist douchegobblers have managed to outdo themselves in terms of the gross messages they’ve sent about women, after 8 seasons of that. (These are the same people who made Sansa say that she was grateful for her rapes and who claimed that Dany’s turn into madness was foreshadowed by her having a “chilly” reaction to the death of her abuser, Viserys, in s1, so…. make of that what you will.) I’m not saying that it was narratively impossible, especially since GRRM has been toying with the same thing in the books and has more than his own share of Male Author Syndrome. But at the start of 8x04, Dany is in Winterfell, perfectly sane, toasting Arya as hero of the battle. By the end of 8x06, she’s crazy, a war criminal, and dead, murdered by her boyfriend, because… well, something something plot reasons. Even if you didn’t like Dany or were rooting for her to go mad or whatever, that was wildly badly handled.

I personally think it would be pretty gross for GRRM to also go down the Mad Queen route, though at least if he does, we will have had Dany’s POV chapters beforehand and presumably something resembling a justification and a building narrative momentum toward it. But she also got stuck in Meereen for so long because by his own admission he didn’t know what to do with her there or how to get her out of the situation and moved onto Westeros, which remains, theoretically, her outstanding goal in the books. It would obviously not be outside the realm of possibility for this to happen, given GRRM’s focus on “grittiness” that the show took to max factor 5000. I would still find it reductive and trying to make a Clever Postmodern Point and etc if it happened in the books, because literally why invest us in a character this long, especially one who has tried so hard to overcome the circumstances of her past/to not be her father, and then just do exactly that? Obviously there would be elements of Shakespearean tragedy to it, and if done well it could be compelling, but I personally just have a different approach to fiction and what people want out of a story (especially one now as famous as GOT/ASOIAF and how universally betrayed everyone seems to feel by the ending). I’m not saying Dany’s ultimate ending needs to be sunshine and roses and getting what she wants, because often character arcs and resolutions become all the more powerful for being subverted and thwarted (think the “I said I wanted [x] but [y] was there instead” sort of endings). But whatever it is, it needs to be…. not that.

Also, Jon in both books and especially show has been the epitome of Mediocre White Man. I stopped watching in s4, but Kit Harington’s acting was so wooden and the writing for him was very much Standard Misunderstood Brooding Fantasy Hero that I could barely pay attention to his scenes. I find him somewhat more interesting in the books, though ADWD dragged for everyone and it was obvious GRRM was writing in circles. But everyone has noticed that especially in the show, Jon does absolutely bupkis. His ass is constantly saved by the women in his life, he makes an absolute hash of any power that he is given and doesn’t want it anyway, and his ultimate ending was…. going back to the Night’s Watch (as their idea of satisfying narrative storytelling is to literally put everyone back where they were in the very first episode, apparently). Never mind the fact that there’s no need for the Night’s Watch, but the point is, even the fact that Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna’s son ended up being relevant for like half an episode. That has been one of the major plot points/secrets of the books (although not so much anymore) and it just…. fizzled out like a damp squib. Dany actually TRIED for multiple seasons to be a good ruler and to learn how to handle power and become a queen, so for her to have to be the one to die for Jon to once again do diddlysquat is… well, as I have said before, the misogyny leaps out. They ended up wasting so much potential and so many other things that were also foreshadowed (and far more convincingly than “wah wah she was gonna go evil!”). For this? So Jon can just go brood in the snow again? Cool.

Not to mention, I find it gross on principle that Dany’s boyfriend had to be the one to kill her, especially after rape/sexual violence/loss of agency was such a big part of her early-season storylines (and how horrifyingly and grossly that has been handled on the show overall). We’re obviously supposed to sympathize with Jon in this scenario and to feel that it is justified to “stop a tyrant” or whatever. Also, if the episode was going to be called “Queenslayer,” why the fuck wasn’t it Jaime fulfilling the valonqar prophecy, another thing they forgot about, and killing Cersei, at great personal grief/cost, to once more stop an insane monarch from burning down King’s Landing? But that, of course, would be actual character development/overall arc, and they preferred to also trash that by having Jaime “killed Aerys Targaryen literally to save half a million innocent people and lived with his reputation being destroyed ever after” Lannister unironically claim that he never cared about the lives of the innocent and only wanted Cersei. After she again tried to kill him and Tyrion like three days ago, not even to mention what they did to Brienne and with that whole arc, but I will have a ragestroke if I think about it too much.

Basically, the ending wasn’t “bittersweet.” It was tragic, reductionist, ham-handed, hugely disappointing for everyone who put years of investment into these characters, and ended up in the amusing position of making Bran Stark the younger and more beautiful queen who comes to cast Cersei down. He became king because… reasons? Whatever? And he knows literally everything about everyone thanks to being the Three-Eyed Raven, so there’s no way that can go horribly wrong. He has basically done nothing except sit in a wheelchair and look creepy for several years now, his arc has never been remotely about being king, and Isaac Hempstead-Wright himself is apparently on record as saying he genuinely thought it was a joke script when he read it. This after both Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington broke down over learning what happened to their characters/Kit apparently realized it for the first time at the read-through and was horrified. Emilia already talked about wandering for five hours and having a crisis and calling her mom and asking to be talked off the ledge like….. fictional choices/characters completely aside, that’s a gross thing to do to your actors. I know they’re all proud of their work and they have apparently and understandably been defensive about the existence of the petition to rewrite s8, but they’ve all been pretty clear, while still being professional and supportive, that there is stuff that they’re just as much WTF about as we are.

Basically, as everyone keeps saying, the acting, cinematography, visual effects, music, etc was clearly up to as high a standard as ever, but was betrayed fundamentally and comprehensively by this god-awfully shit writing by a couple of hacks who clearly rushed the final season to get on to ruining working on Star Wars. They have also been on record about saying “you can’t do what the audience expects or it’ll get boring blah blah blah,” which is a profoundly flawed storytelling strategy if you’re paranoid and trying to outsmart your audience and do something that nobody has ever thought of because you’re an Intellectual Postmodern Commentator On Our Violent Society. If your audience can guess where a story is going, but are still surprised by major twists along the way that then make sense in hindsight, you’ve done your job. If you’re relying on grimdark and cramming in gimmicky plot twists and deus ex machinas and Shocking Moments rather than authentically developing your story, it’s going to bite you in the ass in a big way, as was just proven.

Nobody expected a completely happy ending from GoT. But the fact that they went to such lengths, especially in s8, to build up characters/ships (Jonerys, Braime, Gendrya were all torched after major canon moments completely unexpected by fans, especially the latter two – why even include it unless to just be more Tragique, and Gendrya is the only one that has even a chance in the future since half of it didn’t end up idiotically dead) and then just wrecked all of it…. as I’ve said, good endings don’t need to be rainbows and unicorns and kittens. But if you’ve asked eight years of audience investment, there has to be something that makes it worth it and that doesn’t make everyone feel like they were duped and stupid to get involved in the first place. They have been beating the “it’s a hard world and bad things happen to the characters” drum for all they’re worth, but… it’s just bad. You can analyse and ask why the hell they did things and so forth, but it’s bad. At this rate, the show should have either ended after 8x03, or they should have taken the money HBO offered and done the proper 10 episodes and let Bryan Cogman write all of them. He was the only one who appeared to remotely give a shit about the characters, and since D&D wrote the last four episodes themselves, yeah, this disaster is on them.

Fortunately, I left the show years ago and have TNR and am used to ignoring their version of things. And I knew all along that they never really got the characters or the story. But I feel really bad for everyone who has had this thrown back in their face, and it seems like a communal disenchantment with this ending is going to enter the pop-culture consciousness on a possibly unprecedented level. So if GRRM does do the Mad Queen Dany killed by Jon in the books (though he has apparently called the show’s ending “traumatic”), I’ll probably still not like it. He has a chance to sell me it on/justify it to me narratively, which the show categorically failed to do. I don’t think I will, just because as I said, I don’t like anything about it, but yes.

Anyway. This is a long post already, and I probably have more to say still, but it’s pretty obvious I think it’s just really, really bad, and that’s about the essence of it.

#got #got spoilers #got critical #anonymous #ask

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