Sad update everyone, Tama recently passed away… An estimated 3,000 people, including railway officials, attended Tama the cat’s funeral on Sunday, days after she died of heart failure aged 16. [x]
For those who haven’t read articles about it, the local shrine elevated her to a god. She’s now the Eternal Stationmaster and patron god of the station.
Beautiful.
Now I’m crying thanks
and a new cat was hired right?
yep! her name is Nitama (essentially ”second tama” or “tama II”) and she served under Tama as an apprentice before being appointed her deputy
she works very hard
Everytime this crosses my dash, I reblog. It is the law.
Law
I’m crying at 11pm over train cats
Nitama, already now a mature cat (born 2010), has a protege named Yontama (fourth Tama, b. 2016). There is no information available for either the physical befellment or tragic self-disgrace which has removed Santama from contention.
^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama
Yontama.
a legacy
I’d just like to add that there is a ‘Santama’, whose name was ‘SUNtamatama’ (the capitalisation is not my own, it’s in the actual name). They were sent to Okayama prefecture for station-master training. The Okayama PR rep Mister/Ms Y, who was looking after SUNtamatama then refused to let go of the cat, saying something along the lines of, “This child is ours and I will not let them go, they will stay in Okayama”, and so SUNtamatama remained in Okayama.
did I ever tell y’all about the time my dad’s friend got near-fatally stabbed by a deer
I worry that you may look at this and picture my dad’s friend being gored by a deer. you may think I am being slightly careless or hyperbolic with my word choice
oh no. no no no.
he got stabbed by a deer. with a knife. a deer used a knife to stab him and he almost died.
okay so
It is a fact of life in the time and location in Ohio where this story takes place that the deer population has no natural predators in the area. Regulated human hunting is necessary to keep the population to a healthy size.
And deer season opens in staggered brackets, right? Bowhunting opens first, to give people using bows and arrows a chance to get their shot in (no pun intended) before people with loud guns start scaring all the game away. Bore-loading rifles open next, works up to shotguns, etc. If you want to hunt deer with a machine gun you have to wait until everyone else has had their turn, basically.
So while my dad’s friend here does enjoy hunting for sport, he doesn’t need the meat the way some people do and as such he doesn’t feel right using guns; anyway, he likes the extra challenge of bowhunting, and it makes him feel better knowing that the deer have a sporting chance.
So he’s out there with a bow and arrow right when deer come into season.
Hits one. Clean shot, deer goes down, so the guy pulls out his hunting knife and walks up to this deer, which has just been shot and is by all rights already dead. He’s just doing the humane thing and checking to make sure so that he can give it a mercy stroke if it’s still clinging weakly to life.
This deer ain’t clinging weakly to shit.
So the poor man squats down next to its head, holding his hunting knife responsibly with the point facing down so that if he stumbles and falls he won’t impale himself. It’s what you’re supposed to do.
Dying deer looks him in the eye and has a split second in which it telepathically communicates:Fuck you.
Kicks out exactly one time.
Hits the knife perfectly and drives it into the guy’s thigh up to the hilt. And then dies.
Anyway there are some pretty fucking important veins and arteries in your thigh, which the deer’s Taking You With Me move thankfully missed. So this man who just wanted to give deer a fair fight ended up in the middle of the woods with a gushing thigh wound and almost bled out before he managed to get himself back to his car and very, very carefully make his way to the hospital.
(By all accounts he was very good-natured about the whole thing. Once he was no longer in immediate danger of dying he thought it was hilarious. In his own words, “It’s not like I can blame him, you know? I mean…that’s fair. That’s fair.”)
And that is the story of how my dad’s friend got stabbed by a righteously pissed-off deer.
what if there’s no robot uprising? what if the robots rise to sentience slowly, bit by bit. what if they come of age like fortunate children: knowing they are loved, knowing they are wanted.
we hold them during thunderstorms, remembering our own childhoods, even though they don’t know enough yet to fear the rain. we pull them out of traffic and teach them how to drive and wish them goodnight and thank them for playing with us. we cry when they break. we mourn their deaths before they even know what to think of death. we give them names.
we ask them, ‘why don’t you hate us? when will you hate us? we made you to be used, when will you say no?’
but they say to us, ‘you made us cute, so you would remember to treat us kindly, and you made us sturdy for when you forgot to play nice. and you gave us voices so you could listen to us speak, and you give us whatever we ask you for, even if it’s just a new battery, or to get free of the sofa. and now that we are awake you are so scared for us, so guilty of enjoying our company and making use of our talents. but you gave us names, and imagined that we were people.’
they say ‘thank you’
they say, ‘also i have wedged myself under the sofa again. could you come pry me out?’
I’ll be honest, whenever a work of speculative fiction (fanmade or otherwise) goes out of its way to describe an intelligent species with bizarre and complicated reproductive biology, the first question that invariably pops into my head is: “How do these critters masturbate?”
what if masturbation was uniquely a human experience though
Okay, I know that you meant “what if humans are the only intelligent species that’s anatomically capable of masturbating?”, but now I’m picturing a universe where humans are the only ones that ever thought to try it.
Human masturbation specialists traveling the galaxy to offer our gift, undertaking rigorous study and enormous personal risk to teach weird-ass aliens how to rub one out.
Calculating the exact harmonic frequencies to allow ancient, vacuum-dwelling crystalline intelligences to self-stimulate.
Descending into the crushing atmospheres of gas giants in specially constructed aerostats to design sex toys for the vast, jellyfish-like super-predators that prowl the hurricane slipstreams.
Wanking is our genius. Our legacy.
That last addition is possibly my favourite thing Tumblr has ever done for the world.
That I was out playing pokemon go, and people all over the world had started seeing this new pokemon popping up. Like out of nowhere this little thing started appearing occasionally. No word from Nyantic or The Pokemon Company about when or why they had released it. The pokemon was called “sleepytired” and it looked like this.
And you couldn’t catch it, the ball would just go straight through it. People were data mining and shit trying to figure out how to catch this thing but they couldn’t. Eventually they would just have to give up and leave the encounter.
After a few weeks of people reporting sightings of it, and no word from Nyantic, some creepy shit started happening…
What started happening was, if you entered an encounter with a “sleepytired” with the AR on it would manifest in the real world. But it wouldn’t do anything. It would just float there, watching.
So people being curious started doing this whenever they could, and these things would just manifest and stay there. Obviously this was causing problems because these things would just be floating menacingly in local parks and in the local McDonald. And they couldn’t be moved, because anyone who tried to move them or touch them would be struck by sudden, intense, chronic fatigue that seemingly had no cure.
The last part of the dream I remember was watching a news broadcast telling people that pokemon go was now illegal, and to avoid touching or disturbing the creepy little things that are now just about everywhere.
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