A few years ago, I had an encounter. Walking home from the grocery store, I met a friendly orange cat. Outdoors, with a collar, and a tag that said something like “don’t worry I’m an outdoors cat” on one side, and bore a name on the other side:

Wild Dave.

Every time I’d pass there, I’d look to see if Wild Dave was there again. When I’d pass there with my spouse, I’d mention that this is where Wild Dave was and look for him, to no avail. Sometimes I sort of wondered if he was okay since it’d been a while. I think I’ve seen him one other time since then. He kinda became a legend to my spouse. That’s just a name to conjure with, y’know? Not just Dave but Wild Dave. What did this friendly orange boy do to earn this name? Was it just that his human friends recognized that this was a cat who was essentially untamable, whose territory happened to overlap with theirs? Was it an ironic name given to an ultra-domesticated boy? Was there some story in his past that earnt him the “Wild” addition? I’ll probably never know. The mystery sticks in my mind.

Today, my bike’s rear tire went flat while I was at the cafe reading, so I dropped it off at the bike shop a few blocks down, and walked home. My route took me past where Wild Dave lives but I wasn’t looking; I was reading about some open source drama on my phone. Until I heard a polite “mrap” from down by my feet. And there he was. Wild Dave, just casually coming up to me and sharking my feet as if he saw me every day. I bent down to pet him. Then I remembered I was carrying some snacks for the cats who live around our place, and, well, I couldn’t not: I gave Wild Dave some snacks. A car bounced through a pothole a second later and Dave bolted for under a nearby car; when he didn’t come back after a moment I picked up the snacks and looked around, and there he was across the street, in front of the house I suspect he lives in/under/around. So I crossed over and gave him those snacks again, and he rubbed up against my legs, and I petted him.

Rock on, Wild Dave. May your days be long and full of snacks and scritchies.

I dunno, I just kinda like that I am the kind of person who some cats just run up to and say HEY LADY HI, GOT SCRITCHIES, GOT SNACKS?

Late last week, Tugrik died. Complications of Long Covid, so I’m told.

(That wasn’t his legal name. But it’s the name everyone in the furry fandom knew him by. Probably half his workplaces, too.)

Today I dusted off my account on Furrymuck, the social MMO he ran long before “MMO” was an acronym, let alone an abbreviation for “massively multiplayer online role-playing game”. Back then we all called them “muds” (multiple-user dungeons) or “mucks” (multiple-user chat kingdoms) or “mu*s” (multiple-user-whatevers), and they were all done in the style of the text adventure games of the time.

‘t park, d’. That I still remembered. Teleport to the sky above the park that’s the central gathering point there, and go down. Wave at the few people sitting around, connected. Check the bulletin board. Three new messages from K’Has, one of the other admins: the news of his death, with the cause. Directions to his rooms, where his character object would be found, never to be logged into again. And the details of a memorial service to be held on the muck later this week.

Teleport to a destination marked only by a database reference number. Go north a few time, through wide open plains, to a cavern lair. And there he was. Described like he was still alive. Still there. Nobody ever wrote a description of their character sleeping. Nobody ever wrote one of them dead. Well, almost nobody. I know it would have been possible to build a dynamic description that checked whether the player object was currently active, and returned different text when it wasn’t. And I’m sure that’s a thing a few people did here and there. I considered it but never did. And I’m sure someone wrote descriptions of their characters as dead for some bit of roleplay, or personal drama. But Tug did neither of those things. Like the vast majority of users, his description assumed he was there.

And now he’s not there, and will never be there again.

(Honestly he hadn’t been there in a while anyway, the laston command told me it’d been 47 weeks since he last connected. The mu*s are largely in the past for even the people who ran them.)

I sat there trying to remember how to create an object and give it a multiple-line description. I ended up looking through the manuals on Furry’s homepage. Once upon a time I knew this offhand, but that time’s long gone – back around 2012 I decided that I was done spending long nights co-writing horny short stories, a paragraph or four at a time, in turns. You really can’t share that with anyone besides its co-writer, and going back and re-reading them loses a lot of the magic. I wanted to spend my energy on comics instead, and that seemed to work out pretty well overall now that I look back on it.

I dunno if I’d ever been to Tugrik’s lair before. He’d been to mine a few times, there’s a few files in my logs directory with his name on them. But I’ve been there now, and I left

a black rose(#77471)

A hole in the world, shaped like a rose. Now and then its edges crackle with lightning.

Rest in peace, Big Blue. See you in the next world. -Peggy

next to a big blue dragon-horse that will never move again, along with a couple other objects others had left before me.

And now I’m gonna go off and cry for a while.

Today I came into my studio. Artie (one of the cats) was asleep in the middle of the floor, splayed on her back with her belly up. I sat down at the desk.

Out of the corner of my eye, quite clearly, I saw her get up and walk towards the door. But when I got up to see if she wanted the door open so she could go out, she was still lying on the floor. Hadn’t moved at all.

Did I hallucinate this? Did I slip halfway into a parallel reality for a moment? While I was seeing her leave, I realized afterwards, I heard a sort of droning noise. Was this my nervous system glitching the fuck out or was it me tuning in to a different celestial harmony than usual?

I was, I must note, kind of stoned when this happened. I don’t think that really makes any of those possibilities more or less likely.

Anyway. Glitch in the Matrix day, I guess. Watching the cat take Schroedinger’s Nap.

‘Ren & Stimpy’ Artist and Spümcø Co-founder Jim Smith Has Died, Age 70

RIP Jim Smith.

He could draw rings around the entire rest of the studio with half of his brain tied behind his back. He was probably a better artist than 99% of the entire rest of the world and yet I never felt like the slightest bit of his ego was tied up in that.

One day he brought some shitty teenage art into the studio for some reason. Looking at it realizing that it was shitty in exactly the same way my teenage art was shitty, and that his early pro-level art was just as fucked up as what I was doing at the time, was the moment I realized I could master any kind of art skill if I just dedicated a while to practicing it; since that day, I have never looked at someone else’s work and said “I wish I was that good”, and getting better became a lot easier.

Thanks for that moment, Jim.

Also he was super cool about my transition when it was in that insanely awkward phase of “hormones are making my tits too big to hide in baggy shirts but I still have to shave and have no idea how to present myself as a woman”, despite being from Texas. Really he was just an all-around super chill guy, I’m sure you could piss him off but I never saw it.

Best of luck in the next life.

Get up. Take a shower. Stare in the morning and try to convince the universe you are beautiful, powerful, and successful. And also a super-horny human-taur with giant titties because that’s a good way to put a little passion into that desire, I guess? Why not. Aim for the stars and

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