Maru's Mun Journal

Here, have an advertising inspired icon. This is actually a campaign here in Germany (just with the words in German) for Whiskas cat food. Don't know if they sell that internationally.

It's quite a sophisticated campaign, mixing media quite well*, with online and offline elements, and user content that really works where you can upload videos of your own cat being special and funny. It works well with the cat-loving demographic, of course.

* This part where I babble about advertising is brought to you by overdoses of 'Mad Men' and long-time association with my friend japanologist, who runs his own agency.

But anyway, every workday when I go home by train, I pass several large billboards aimed at the commuters on the line,  bright purple, with just that slogan in white and no other picture of anything, and I lean back in my seat, relax a little, smile, and think, 'Yes, I love my cats, and am on my way home to them right now, and will spend my evening cuddling them on my divan while incidentally poking things on my computer (from their point of view), and that is entirely a Good Thing.

Just now somebody in crackchat talked about having had a shitty day (literally, poor lady!) and now going to lie on her bed with her dog and write.

I mean, we don't need those animals on a utilitarian everyday basis any more. Not all dogs have jobs any more, and cats probably never really had -- carolinw once pointed me to an article that claimed that basically, cats domesticated people and conned them into giving them an easy life in exchange for killing vermin, which they do anyway, so the cats win coming and going.

But we need them. Living in cities, far from nature, makes us need them more than ever before. Our tame animals keep us rooted to our own animal nature, you might say.

There's these people who claim that the Neolithic Revolution was a bad move, inexorable alienating people from nature and introducing things like work, exploitation, and privilege, and that the best time for humanity was in mesolithic times when we had already invented a few clever things and roamed the open country with our dogs**, never working too hard, and living very well with it. There are many different proponents of that theory, from the author of 'Ishmael' to the experimental archaeology bloke at the little museum one town over from where our family holidays at the Baltic Sea happen.

** At that time, with no granaries, safe houses, and stable life routines, cats did not find us interesting enough yet to domesticate us. They only did that when we first provided these things in Ancient Egypt.

In any case, whatever these people say, there is no going back. We are city dwellers, and I don't want to live without tea, public transport, or the internet, thank you very much. And my cats seem to be quite happy with what I provide them with. Especially the bright purple tins of cat food that contain more sauce than any other wet cat food. Sauce, as such, is a product of civilisation. I doubt those mesolithic golden-agers made sauces much. But my cats adore it.

And keep me grounded in nature. At least a little bit.

I think it's really sweet how they're holding paws...

( More randomness from my phone camera )

Nah, not my personal drama. I don't really do drama. I sometimes worry about other people's drama, but really, I prefer to have the stuff at the Crackbar, where it belongs, instead of in RL.

It's just the dramatic old stories that my parents told me over breakfast about one branch of our family, my last surviving grand-uncle and his descendants.

We are all very tame; all the drama, tragedy, soap opera and general mayhem centers on that one branch. Which is quite leafy. And knotty and gnarly, to keep with the tree metaphor.

Really, it's the sort of thing you expect at the Crackbar, in South American Telenovelas, in modern epics taking place in Savannah or New Orleans, or perhaps among the Cheysuli and Ihlini. Definitely lurid, angsty, painful, squicky and (for an outsider) almost entertaining. I don't think I should tell the actual stories as they're probably just as banal to read as they must have been painful to live through, but suffice it to say, Tynstar, Strahan and Lochiel are comparatively harmless compared to that self-centred old man. I was aghast, and amused in a very odd, surreal way.-

In other news: I did not manage to buy anything not black or purple today when shopping with my mother. I got black trousers, and a beautiful dark violet flared velvet shirt. Erm. And then we went to buy sweater-and-cardigan sets for my mother, and one of them is black, to offset the wonderful miniature replica of the Nebra Sky Disc that my mother's best friend had given her for Christmas, and then she wanted to get herself another one and of course she asked me which colour I thought was best, and of course I advised he to buy the violet heather-coloured turtle-necked set, and of course she did...



So we both came back with black and purkle clothes. Character bleed gets dangerous when it starts touching innocent people. ..