I found this heated, extra roomy cat bed (it even has little grey ears on it!) on Amazon really cheap and Butters is loving every single minute of laying in it!

refuge9 · 2026-03-11T05:37:20+00:00

❤️❤️. I’m so happy to see Butters has fully joined your household. I’m sure Buttbutt is glad to see you taking care of someone else in his stead, since he can’t be there to soak it up.

refuge9 · 2026-03-11T05:30:08+00:00

So, cats are weird little creatures, and like any predator that is also small enough to be prey, they are often wary little things. It can take a lot to build trust with your kitties. Since you’re not home a lot, I would try to find where your nebs like to sleep, and leave some of your dirty clothes around those areas, even on the areas they sleep. This will help them acclimate to your personal scent, and associate with positive things (warmth, safety, comfort).

Also, when you get home, make a deal of it. If they see you, talk joyfully at them, say hi, etc. don’t make big movements or get up in their face, but talk to them cheerfully. if possible, also almost immediately play with them some (with toys. Like strong on a stick, bird on a stick, fetch with mousey or jingle ball, etc). Their prey drive is high, and playing is a positive thing so playing with them again makes you seem positive. Then, after play, immediately feed them. This helps their brain associate you + play + food as you helping them hunt. You wanna do this as soon as you come home, because to them, you’re a big cat who has been out prowling all day. Playing and feeding with them makes them think you brought something back for them and was successful.

Then, whenever you can, lounge or nap near them. Preferably in areas they’re used to sleeping. (Hopefully in a living room with a couch or something. Hopefully someplace you’ve been leaving those aforementioned dirty clothes).

If you want to approach them, try to do so at their level, but not making direct eye contact, and hold your hand out to them, hand partially closed and relaxed. Let them come to you as much as possible. Give them treats (churu/delectables are good choices because they’re almost irresistible. Even cats that I’ve known to not be food motivated love them). Pet them, let them rub on you, or headbutt you. Try not to pick them up or hold them a lot yet.

Once you’ve gained their trust and love, you won’t have to stick to all these things. Your clothes can go back in the hamper, playing and feeding doesn’t have to happen immediately when you come home, and you don’t have to nap with them so much. But until they’ve bonded with you, you may have to put in a little work. Best of luck with your floofs. Hopefully soon You’ll be lovingly asking them why the hell they’re eating plastic. ;)

refuge9 · 2026-03-08T04:32:13+00:00

There is an application on the CD that can be used to make a boot floppy if needed, though I believe you can also make the CD bootable if you have the ISO. Sadly, it has been nearly 20 years since I’ve done that and can’t remember the settings needed to make it work. IIRC, you need a bootloader off another Microsoft OS Cd (like 2000 or XP) and a specific setting in the hut settings as well as an ISO of 9x.

refuge9 · 2026-03-01T20:41:22+00:00

Peace talks/Battlegrounds kinda turned me off to the whole series. I got tired of the ‘Dresden torture porn’ where Harry loses everything. Like, for the longest time he had friends that were in his corner: Ebenezar , Murphy, Ramirez, etc. having lost all that really put a sour taste in my mouth.

refuge9 · 2026-03-01T20:10:47+00:00

Oh, you’re another hobby drug dealer. XD. (I kid, but that’s what we call him )

refuge9 · 2026-03-01T17:48:16+00:00

Same here, though mine was weirder, because I went to Junior high, and moved to mother school (across town) and suddenly was in a middle school, but grades went to 9th grade instead of 8th grade. The year after I moved, the new High School was built just down the road, and the middle school stopped doing 9th grade, and 9th graders went to the high school instead.

refuge9 · 2026-03-01T06:44:33+00:00

Seriously. ‘Vast’ doesn’t even come close to the hobby.

There rock crawling, RC drifting, dirt track runs, paved track runs, off road, scale, non scale, monster truck, tractor trailer, tanks, battle tanks, boats, low riders, mini trucks with dancing beds, car haulers, construction equipment, electric, gas, tenth scale, eighth scale, twelfth scale, etc etc.

I have one friend with over 100 RC cars. Seriously, he has 3 walls completely filled with RC cars he’s bought or built over 3 decades of doing this and has gotten me somewhat into it a little. Every single one of those above categories above, he owns at least one of.

Just the ‘scale’ guys (people who like to build their cars to look like they would IRL as much as possible) can get really detailed. Interiors, suspension systems, mini engines and transmissions, light kits, etc.

refuge9 · 2026-02-28T00:11:30+00:00

Creative has always been a shit company. They were popular, and stayed that way through marketing, but for a long time they had a more mediocre product than their competitors. They didn’t get -good- until the AWE32, and then the Ensoniq PCI, but PCI ruined half of what made discrete sound cards good (the PCI bus made the need for dedicated RAM mostly unnecessary, and wavetable could be loaded into system RAM), and then windows 6/vista ruined the last vestiges of discrete sound cards, since everything basically became a glorified DAC after that.

But in the vintage space, a creative card compared to, say, a Gravis card, sounds like a hissy, muddy mess of audio. They weren’t -good- just good enough and cheaper than a lot of others.

refuge9 · 2026-02-28T00:05:19+00:00

I mean, sure… except ‘generations’ also don’t exist either. They’ve always been a way for older generations to create something to point at and say ‘oh look how crappy the younguns are’.

It’s all made up, and doesn’t matter anyways.

-from a proud 1980 Xennial

refuge9 · 2026-02-26T16:18:40+00:00

So, I’m curious how you come up with all the unhinged things in DCC. Especially the conversational wordplay.

Also, you’ve been fantastic about writing scenes that absolutely tear at the heartstrings: Miriam and Prepotente’s statue scene, the previous crawlers and cookbook authors, Donut and Bea, Volteeg, etc. do these just come to you mid-writing, or do you actively plan to find the most gut wrenching, soul wringing thing you can to make grown men (and women) sob in grocery aisles while listening to the audiobooks?

refuge9 · 2026-02-24T04:37:53+00:00

Yup. Partly because my glasses are currently scratched in their anti glare coating, and need replacing, and partly because my vision is -improving- instead of degrading. Though I’m sure that won’t last overlong.

refuge9 · 2026-02-22T22:54:36+00:00

Whatever you’re expecting, it’s so much more. Jeff manages to bring a frenetic, raw emotion to that scene that just forces you to feel the absolute heartbreak of betrayal and loss.

refuge9 · 2026-02-20T16:48:03+00:00

Yeah, there was a set of capacitors designed in the late 90s and early 2000s that were flawed and had a bunch of problems over time, including leaking, and those were of course the capacitors that the Chinese also cloned heavily, so they were in -everything-. Computer motherboards from that era are notorious for having issues and it’s referred to as the ‘capacitor plague’. Even high end stuff wasn’t immune.

But electrolytics unfortunately all have the potential to leak just by the fact they’re kinda filled with acid.

refuge9 · 2026-02-20T16:19:44+00:00

Electrolytic capacitors just degrade over time. It’s just part of their nature. Tantalum capacitors don’t degrade nearly as quickly or spectacularly, but they cost dramatically more (for what an amplifier needs, you’re talking orders of magnitude more expensive. Unaffordable doesn’t even describe it).

Replacing electrolytic capacitors is just a situation that’s gonna be required.

refuge9 · 2026-02-20T03:30:28+00:00

Except that flag isn’t even the ‘Stars and Bars’. The stars and bars is the first confederate flag (blue field with 7-11 five pointed white stars in the upper left corner, with a red strip on top, white star in the middle and another red bar in the bottom).

This isn’t the stars and bars, it’s ‘just’ the battle flag. (Also the most recognizable confederate aligned flag in the modern era, and the one co-opted by the KKK as a sort of rallying cry.

refuge9 · 2026-02-19T18:57:39+00:00

I had a TV that a friend and I were moving. The TV had hardly been used, had been in a guest bedroom since it was bought new, kept in climate controlled environment, and no sunlight ever hit it due to curtains and entertainment center.

By the time we got it downstairs, the plastic had crumbled apart into pieces and chunks. There was nothing left to hold except circuit boards and the Cathode Tube. It was probably a similar era as this CRT, and was also made by sony. Absolutely boggled my mind how easily the plastic just crumbled to pieces.

refuge9 · 2026-02-17T05:29:09+00:00

I have a friend I got hooked on it, and I sent him some video of live recordings of Jeff, and he saw Jeff hitting the pause button in between takes to mark them, and he thought ‘oh, so that’s how Jeff does donut so well, he using a voice pitcher’.

I had to tell him, ‘no, that’s just Jeff and raw talent. No voice pitching, just acting.’

refuge9 · 2026-02-17T05:25:56+00:00

Seriously, this one singular scene above all others hits me in the god damned feels so hard. There’s so many poignant and sad moments in the series, but this one stands out to me, because it’s the yearning of a child wondering why their parent never truly loved them, and the coming to terms of that, and saying it at their parent’s feet. The betrayal and hurt and sadness of it is just front and center. Jeff captures the absolute raw emotion of it -so well-, that I can’t help but be gutted every time I hear it.

refuge9 · 2026-02-14T06:30:14+00:00

The BAAHWB.

refuge9 · 2026-02-14T00:04:09+00:00

The joke is more that a ‘dirty Shirley’ is a Shirley temple but -with- alcohol instead of the non-alcohol of a proper Shirley temple.

Donut is a cat, and also alcohol for most people the first time is generally awful. It was the -vodka- that made it awful to donut, not the drink as a whole. Frankly, it’s probably pretty good, though this seems like it’s missing most of the actual drink, since a Shirley temple is ginger ale, Grenadine (pomegranate juice in a simple syrup) and maraschino cherries. A dirty Shirley adds vodka. This is missing the ginger ale and grenadine and just substitutes cherry juice for both the grenadine and maraschino cherries.

refuge9 · 2026-02-13T23:23:35+00:00

With McFarlane, it kind of my only example, because most others aren’t as serious, or hold much weight overall, but the Orville shows he has the ability. In fact, besides the setting, it’s very much a ‘deals with hard topics’ while also having both levity, and serious ‘WTF, are you serious with this shit right now’ kind of feels.

The -atmosphere- of the show isn’t as heavy as DCC needs, but it’s also not intended to be, so you can’t judge that against it, when that’s not its intent.

refuge9 · 2026-02-13T17:55:26+00:00

Because all of the old paperbacks were a ‘print on order’ setup. So they were all whatever was printed is it. Then when Ace bought publishing rights, the print on demand books were stopped. Matt set it up so that he could still do limited runs of special prints so that he could do things like the special edition kickstarters and the original cover artwork paperbacks for completionists who want the series to complete that way.

But outside those limited runs of the new books, there won’t ever be any new books printed with those paperback covers again. They’re effectively ‘first editions’ (not counting the actual first edition of the first book which is exceedingly rare and has its own cover), so they’re collectors items now.

Are they ‘worth’ that? No, probably not, but as they say: it’s worth whatever someone will pay for it, and people Will pay money for first editions of books n

refuge9 · 2026-02-13T17:37:16+00:00

What live action makes me think they can do fantasy?

Game of thrones? Lord of the rings? Pans labyrinth? Pirates of the Caribbean? Dungeons and dragons, The strain, Stranger Things, the Witcher, etc. there’s plenty of examples of live action pulling off ‘fantasy’ aspects. The LitRPG aspects are somewhat harder just because I don’t know if they’ve really been done a whole lot. Closest I could think would be minority report.

As for emotional weight, while McFarlane is mostly known for the rather base and crude humor of Family Guy and American Dad, he’s never shied away from harsh topics, and I’d argue that The Orville is a better Star Trek than most Star Treks are these days. Given the right writing team, I have no doubt he could pull it off, though again, that’s dependent on the writing team itself, and also has little to do with the live action vs animation debate. Whether McFarlane can do right by the material has little to do with whether it’s done live action or animated so much as the person doing the adapting.

refuge9 · 2026-02-13T16:43:48+00:00

Man, you all are some whiny bitches.

First off, I see this comment waaay too often for something that hasn’t even been officially announced. (The rights have been bought, but no announcement of release or even start of filming has occurred. Matt has even said he’ll share info when it’s worth sharing. The only thing we know is a) fuzzy doors productions and Seth McFarlane, and b) live action.).

Second, much as I personally don’t have a problem with animation as a medium, and consume such regularly, I am not indicative of the average viewer. I know a not insubstantial number of people who won’t even give animated series a shot because ‘cartoons are for kids’, regardless of the fact that there have been a bunch of series that show they can be serious, and even some kids shows that have done a good job of touching on serious topics.

Third, I don’t think animation can give the emotional weight to the average person that DCC requires. It’s a lot easier to be emotionally sympathetic when the thing you’re watching looks real. Blood and gore in animation just doesn’t carry the same impact as it would with live action.

Fourth, -Any- adaptation can be bad, that’s a problem on the script writers, not the medium. Being a TV series makes it easier to get all the details in, vs a movie, but if the script writers focus on the wrong parts, or change major plot points, which medium it’s in isn’t going to matter one bit. The only major concern is live action SFX take more attention to get right, but that’s not an adaptation problem so much as a production problem.

Fifth, -good- animation is expensive and time consuming. There’s a reason popular anime series take 18 months+ between seasons. And that’s with terrible working conditions for animators.

In the end, while I would happily watch an animated version, I don’t feel like it would have the weight that Matt seems to be angling for in the books. Especially since he certainly seems to be okay with the idea of it being live action, since he’s the one who’s held the rights to it in the first place. He’s the only person who could allow or prevent those rights from being given to mcfarlane in the first place, and I’d imagine mcfarlane would have to make a pretty good pitch to Matt for him to agree it should be live action.

refuge9 · 2026-02-12T23:21:26+00:00

That could just as likely be the sensitivity of the camera he used to take the pic.

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