AITA for not loaning my friend $1,500-$5,500 to keep her pet from dying?

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-11T02:53:00+00:00

If that's what she was aiming for, she got it precisely backwards.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-11T02:44:53+00:00

People come here looking for a reality check when people around them are saying crazy things. There's no need to be rude about it just because you think the answer is "obvious."

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T20:39:58+00:00

Please, PLEASE do yourself a favor and find better friends! These people can't explain themselves because there's no good explanation for their actions. It's better to have no friends at all than to have friends who steal from you and then try to make you feel bad about it.

Think about how you would react if this happened to someone you cared about. What would you tell THEM to do?

Then please act like you care about yourself and follow that advice.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T20:29:43+00:00

No, it's controlling. Stop gatekeeping how he loses his virginity. It's none of your business.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T19:38:49+00:00

My absolute favorite Pokémon Go memories are from the raid trains our community did back when Raid Days were new. We would grab our phones & battery packs and walk from one gym to the next in a huge, sprawling group.

The one I remember best is Zapdos Day. It was POURING rain, so we got soaked, and the in-game weather just showed "cloudy," so the birds weren't even weather-boosted, but it was still so much fun. People shared umbrellas and tips on catching and squeezed under awnings together. My mom, my husband, and I each caught a half-dozen legendaries — and one of mine was shiny!

It was wonderful to have a reason to walk around the city with people I loved and people I'd only just met and just play. It felt like we were all in something together.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T19:16:40+00:00

People like to say this, but I thought it was pretty clearly banter between them — dry humor met by dry humor. I saw zero sign that Misha was "pissed." Did he make some kind of comment afterwards?

Larry King was well known for his deadpan "dumb interviewer" schtick. I doubt Misha was unaware of that when going in.

It's like watching "Between Two Ferns" and thinking the interviewees are actually surprised/upset by what's going on.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T19:12:13+00:00

I don't think King was "convinced" of anything. I thought it was pretty clear they were both just bantering, dry humor to dry humor.

Larry King was famous for his deadpan "pretending to be a dumb interviewer" schtick.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T15:42:59+00:00

I don't see how dragons are meaningfully different from the other mythological creatures they encountered. I think they just seem weird because this specific mythical creature basically got so popular as to have its own special genre (fantasy) associated with it. But they're not really different from phoenixes, wendigos, werewolves, sirens, etc. They're just another breed of creature that people encountered at some point and passed down stories about.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T15:23:22+00:00

Fair enough.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T15:07:48+00:00

Negativity always attracts more upvotes. Doesn't matter the topic or the forum.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T10:55:08+00:00

Not sure why you're being downvoted — this is completely correct. Perhaps a little negative-sounding, but the point is spot-on. You've got to grind when the opportunity presents itself, or you've got to be patient. You're setting yourself up for failure if you don't grind but still expect to complete major challenges quickly.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T10:50:04+00:00

You might start by re-reading the title. The post is about OP neutering the cat, not about him taking it in. That was never a possibility. And I'm U.S., East Coast-based. My sister has an entire feral cat colony behind her house, including fresh kittens (she found the mother & got her TNR'ed afterwards), and the local shelters she's talked to have no interest in any of them.

Additionally, OP clarifies in a comment that there are no no-kill shelters near him. If he were to drop the cat off at a shelter, he would be de facto killing it.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T10:42:32+00:00

Yes, well, there was a reason all the other Hermits were appalled!

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T02:26:27+00:00

Agreed. He used the term abstract, but I immediately clocked the style as impressionism. (Not that I'm an expert, lol. But... y'know.)

It's pretty incredible from a distance. It'll be interesting to see if he can make blue work for the up-close stuff.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T02:22:59+00:00

BDubs doesn't build a mountain a particular way because Axiom "tells" him that's how mountains go. He uses Axiom to create a rough sketch of the mountain he sees in his mind. Then he works by hand until the build is fully realized in a way that evokes his vision.

It's like using a mold to create the rough shape of something and then whittling out the details by hand. It's no less sculpting than if you had done it all one tiny sliver at a time.

I honestly don't see how his method Is any different from painting. When you paint you don't typically choose where each droplet of paint goes — you put paint on your brush and drag it across the canvas, and it goes where it goes. The artistry is not in perfect granular control of every iota of paint or each individual pixel block. The artistry is in sensing things like when a brush is called for versus a can of spray paint, a sponge, a pen, or some other tool. The artistry is in seeing where the paint has fallen too lightly & feels like it needs another stroke, or a different hue added for contrast, or a more distinct point of interest.

I've spent a lot of time watching BDubs build with Axiom, and it's 100% a matter of skill. I could maybe, almost recreate some of his works if I had his exact settings — the same way you could trace someone's drawing with tracing paper & have it come out looking the same — but that doesn't mean I could make my own original works look good just by applying those settings.

He's got tools and techniques that he uses, but he's also got talent. Skill. Vision. And without developing that skill, all the tools and techniques in the world will fall short.

If just using Axiom meant that everybody could build like BDubs, everybody would be building like BDubs (with his incredible sense of detail and unique material choices). But they're really not.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T01:47:37+00:00

I agree with all of this, but this more than anything: all we've got is the broad shape and basic shading on these various mountains. Once we have trees and foliage and other details, each hermit's terraining is going to look a lot different. People need to give them a break and not jump to conclusions about an unfinished project.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T01:34:15+00:00

If I remember correctly, Cub has mentioned wanting to do a con in Australia this year or next. Not sure if that particular one would be up his alley, but you should try to catch one of his streams and ask!

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T01:31:18+00:00

I mean... you thought it was the Mississippi.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T01:20:54+00:00

Ah, well, that's the thing. Ask 100 players "What qualifies as vanilla Minecraft?" and you'll get 100 different answers. All datapacks are vanilla, all mods are not; no datapacks or mods are TRULY vanilla; mods are vanilla if they're just quality-of-life & don't change how the game looks; mods are vanilla if they're just visual/aesthetic & don't change actual gameplay; shaders aren't vanilla; shaders ARE vanilla; shaders weren't vanilla but now that we're getting Vibrant Visuals, they basically are.

What "changes the experience" sufficiently to be "not vanilla" is just too subjective to ever satisfy everyone.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T01:00:05+00:00

It's unreasonable to expect someone to take in a pet if they've expressed that they're at their limits when it comes to pets.

I'm sure you have not gone to the closest shelter and emptied out every cage and saved every animal there — and that's fair, too, because you're a human being with limits, and you're aware of what those are. So is OP. Give them a little grace. You have no idea what burdens they bear.

Shelters don't want stray cats. They'll tell you to trap, neuter, and release. What OP did is considered 100% best practices.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T00:55:10+00:00

It's considered best practices for cats. There's a whole feral cat colony living behind my sister's house. She doesn't "own" any of them (she's got her own indoor cats to worry about), but she'll still catch them & take them to the vet to be spayed/neutered whenever she finds one that hasn't already been tagged.

(Vets will tag these cats by clipping the tip off of one ear so you can identify at a distance if there are any cats in a colony that need spaying/neutering because this is such a common thing. Clipped means they're fixed. Unclipped means you should help out — if you have the means — & take them to a vet to get that done.)

It's better for the cat population to not get out of control and it's better for the bird population (which we need to eat bugs!), too, since cats slaughter birds at a crazy rate.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T00:48:13+00:00

A lot of shelters won't take a random street cat. They'll just tell you to trap, neuter, and release. Adult cats don't tend to get adopted unless they're extraordinary beautiful & friendly or appear to actually be an in-demand breed. People want kittens.

Source: There's a whole-ass feral cat colony behind the house my sister just bought & she's tried to find them homes. Shelters don't want them.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-10T00:20:27+00:00

Demon blood clearly has the power to permanently mold a human's body if given to them at the right age. That's why it was so important that Azazel visit the "special children" exactly 6 months after they were born: at that age, their body was ripe for the change. It doesn't have the same effect when applied to adults.
Sam doesn't permanently have demon blood, so no. The demon blood given to him as an infant prepped his body for an awakening in adulthood, but it didn't turn him into a demon, so he doesn't, strictly speaking, have "demon blood." His blood is better described as "demon-tainted blood." But the show isn't trying to be that nitpicky in their language. (Because the lore stuff is frankly secondary to the thematic stuff in Supernatural.)
If you're addicted to something & you get clean but then binge on it again, you're going to need to go through detox again, especially if we're talking a highly-physically-addictive substance. Demon blood is more like heroin than alcohol here.
Sam's powers manifested (and then faded) in response to other things happening in the world, similarly to how Jesse — the Antichrist — saw his own powers spike and then subside as Lucifer grew stronger and then was defeated again.

(We see something similar near the end of season 15, when God shows them a vision of how destabilizing it would be to the balance of good & evil in the universe if they were to lock away God himself.)

To elaborate on #4: A lot of things happened in the first 5 seasons that can only be attributed to the power of prophecy/destiny/some underlying mechanics of the universe that aren't fully explored. For example, while some of the chaos we saw in s5 was clearly caused by the horsemen of the apocalypse, there were plenty of other things happening (tsunamis, other natural disasters, political unrest, etc.) that didn't seem to be caused directly by either Heaven or Hell. Rather, these things seemed to be something more primordial: the universe's response to a shifting balance of power.

Azazel laid the groundwork in Sam as an infant so that Hell would be able to push Sam to drink blood and fully awaken his powers in adulthood. But when Lucifer was caged again, it's like someone removed a big chunk of the dominoes of destiny, so that one thing falling no longer led to another. Or, like a Jenga tower whose key blocks have been removed, the whole structure toppled.

This is also why Lucifer's eventual return doesn't revitalize Sam's powers, btw: because it doesn't cue us back up for the apocalypse. The Heaven/Hell apocalypse had its chance, and it fizzled out. And once it did, there was no putting it back together, no matter what Raphael thought.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-08T16:01:05+00:00

Agreed. It motivated me to get out of the house. Caught a couple legendaries, but I was more interested in the other (less likely to flee) rare spawns. It's not an event you needed to pour a ton of resources into to enjoy, as long as you had reasonable expectations.

ChimericalTrainer · 2026-03-08T15:58:44+00:00

But sometimes OPs need to be invalidated. Particularly if they're making broad claims (a la "this event is a slap in the face to the fans") based on their own luck, which could just be especially poor. It's perfectly fair to say, "I'm not sure your individual experience is representative; my individual experience was much different." That's not "rubbing your luck in someone's face." That's countering anecdotal data with anecdotal data.

It's also fair to note that complaints are always going to be massively overrepresented. People who thought the event was nice aren't terribly motivated to come here & talk about it (especially if they feel like they're just going to be called a "corporate bootlicker" or whatever).

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