August 25th, 2025
posted by [syndicated profile] xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 25/08/2025
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

posted by [syndicated profile] icanhascheezburger_feed at 08:00pm on 25/08/2025
posted by [syndicated profile] icanhascheezburger_feed at 07:00pm on 25/08/2025
posted by [syndicated profile] icanhascheezburger_feed at 06:00pm on 25/08/2025
posted by [syndicated profile] in_the_pipeline_feed at 12:39pm on 25/08/2025

After that big lithium-and-Alzheimer’s paper recently, I thought a look at the chemistry of the lithium orotate used therein would be worthwhile. So let’s get into ion behavior for a bit:

As the chemists in the crowd know, there are several general behaviors that you see for ionic compounds in solution. If you think of all ionic substances as fully solvent-separated solvated ions once they're in solution, just ions, all the same, the other possibilities are going to sneak up on you. And these vary according to both the anion and cation, naturally, and according to the concentration, and very much so with the nature of the solvent and whatever other species might be floating around in there (overall ionic strength is certainly a factor, for one). Let’s stick with water as the solvent for the three most distinct classifications:

1. A fully solvated ion pair. That’s what you’d see with (for example) a low concentration of sodium chloride in water. The most energetically favorable state has the sodium cation and the chloride anion each surrounded by their own “solvation shells” of water molecules; it’s like they are each in their own bubbles of slightly-more-orderly water. The ions are not really “seeing” each other at all.

2. A solvent-separated ion pair, which can also be known as an “outer-sphere complex”. In this situation the anion and cation are separated by (pretty much) a single layer of water molecules (or indeed a single water molecule itself). In this case there certainly is an electrostatic interaction between the two anions, but the lowest energetic state of the system includes a solvent molecule in there too.

3. A contact ion pair, which can also be known as an “inner-sphere complex”. Here the anion and cation are right next to each other, fully electrostatically paired. Indeed, this situation can usually be described as “partially covalent”; the interaction is that tight. It’s like the far end of the spectrum of polarized covalent bonds, like drawing a sulfoxide as an S-plus connected to an O-minus. The two ions are surrounded by a common solvation shell of water molecules; there’s nothing between them.

There are several factors that go into the thermodynamics of these states. There’s outright Coulombic attraction (positive charges and negative ones), but note that Coulomb’s Law includes a term in the denominator for the dielectric constant of the medium (so water is going to be rather different than less polar solvents and more apt to separate things). And you’ll also have to keep in mind that your ions are going to have a polarizing effect on those nearby solvent molecules, somewhat cancelling out the situation compared to “naked charges” alone. You’ve also got enthalpic contributions from all those solvation interactions with the water molecules, balanced with the entropy changes that come from making more orderly solvation shells out of those waters. And there’s the loss of entropy that comes from having ions associated with each other rather than swimming around randomly.

OK, now what do we know about lithium orotate’s behavior? I ask because many people (in the comments here and elsewhere) have had a hard time imagining that it can be all that different from any other lithium salt. With lithium chloride or lithium carbonate, you would absolutely expect the two ions to go off on their separately solvated adventures by themselves, so why shouldn’t any lithium whateverate do the same?

It is a question with a surprisingly long and controversial history, which is very well summed up here. and in even more detail in this article. In short, claims were made in 1973 that lithium orotate dosing led to higher CNS concentrations than lithium carbonate dosing. A followup study in 1976 did not confirm this, but another in 1978 apparently did see such differences (up to threefold higher concentrations with the orotate). A 1979 followup, though, suggested that this could be an artifact of impaired renal function after the orotate dosing, and that report seems to have shut down this area of inquiry for some time. More recent toxicological investigations have not seen any such effects, however. In fact, lithium carbonate seems to have more renal toxicity problems itself - it’s possible that lithium orotate is a safer compound, pharmacokinetic and efficacy claims aside.

But what about those pharmacokinetic differences? Are they real, and if so, how does this occur? Well, the PK of lithium salts in general seems to be a battleground (see section 6.1 here). Most lithium dosing in the psychiatric field is lithium carbonate, but that’s due to its easier formulation compared to lithium chloride (it’s non-hygroscopic, i.e. it does not soak up moisture from the air). Lithium chloride itself has some regulatory issues left over from its (over)use in salt substitutes in the 1930s and 40s as well. Lithium citrate is available as a substitute for people who have difficulty swallowing the lithium carbonate caplets, and there are varying reports of whether it has any PK differences compared to the carbonate. Lithium sulfate seems to have no real differences.

Orotate salts, though, may well be a different matter. It’s been observed, for example, that magnesium orotate does not have the laxative effects of common magnesium salts, which suggests that it does not ionize under physiological conditions the way that those do. The lithium/Alzheimer’s paper showed that lithium orotate solutions showed notably lower conductivity than other lithium salt solutions, and that is indeed a measure of their degree of ionization (i.e., more contact ion pairing than for the other salts). It is possible that the lithium-orotate pair is handled as a single substance. At the destination end, there is evidence that orotate is transported via a urate receptor (URAT1) which is found in both the kidney and the choroid plexus (for entry into the brain), and it may be taken up through nucleotide transporters as well. And once in the cell, orotate is already an intermediate in pyrimidine synthesis, which might be a way to finally liberate the lithium counterion.

More needs to be done to shore up all these ideas, but they are not implausible. This paper goes a way towards that, showing that lithium-driven mouse behavioral assays are significantly different with the orotate salt, and that inhibition of anion transport pathways (or of the pentose phosphate pathway for nucleotide synthesis) seem to shut off these effects. So there is reason to think that lithium orotate could indeed be different from other lithium salts, and that these differences are exploitable for its use in lithium supplementation into the CNS. That of course is a separate issue from “Is lithium deficiency the cause of Alzheimer’s” and from “Would lithium supplementation be a useful Alzheimer’s therapy”. But it would behoove us to figure this out in case the answer to either of those latter questions is “yes”.

posted by [syndicated profile] questionable_content_feed at 10:00pm on 25/08/2025

Posted by Sarah Brown

Fifteen years ago, this family adopted two shelter kitties despite knowing one of their parents was allergic. At the time, it seemed manageable. Visits were infrequent, no kids to handle, and the cats filled the home with purrsonality. The parent has never truly warmed up, annually reminding everyone of the feline faux-paw. This week, after the grandkids' sleepover triggered a sneeze-fest, a dramatic message arrived: "Can't you just get rid of the cats?"

To be fair, the furmiliy has bent over backward, lint-rolling like Olympic champions, furoiusly vacuuming, locking cats away, and even investing in air filters. Sometimes the parent reacts, sometimes not, even without meds. Interestingly, when siblings had cats, no whiskers of blame were directed their way. And when a supposedly "hypoallergenic" attic cat moved in, the parent mysteriously had zero reactions. Suspicious? Fur sure.

Now, rehoming is on the table, but these cats have been an emotional lifeline, especially during postpartum struggles. The new plan? Try science-backed kibble to reduce allergens. In the end, the cats are clearly more than pets. They're family. Would keeping them really make this pawrent the villain?

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Posted by Sarah Brown

Cats are the true champions of waking up on the wrong side of the bed. One minute, they're adorable, purring machines of fluff and charm; the next, they're plotting your demise over something as trivial as a slightly tilted food bowl. Mornings are particularly perilous. Attempt to pet a grumpy cat too early, and you might find yourself facing the wrath of a tiny paw swipe or a pointed glare that could curdle milk. Their tail flicks are Morse code for, "Do not disturb… unless you want consequences."

It's not personal. It's just cats catting. Breakfast arrived three seconds late? Catastrophe. A sunbeam shifted by an inch? World-ending injustice. The slightest disruption to their meticulously curated nap schedule can unleash a storm of huffs, grumbles, and dramatic sprints across the room. Yet, even at their grumpiest, there's an undeniable charm. You can't stay mad at a cat whose whiskers twitch with irritation and then curl into your lap five minutes later, purring like nothing happened.

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Posted by Laurent Shinar

Cats disappearing is not a totally uncommon thing. For some feline pawrents it is part and parcel of their day to day lives with their cat children. But what happens when your cat child goes off for a few days to get a taste of the wild and comes home with a different pawsonality?

Some might wonder if it is the same cat that came home and not an imposter. Others might question if the cat saw something while out in the wide world that shook it to its core. But what this pawrent thinks happened is far more sever and opens up the question of how trusting we should be with letting our cute cat child go of gallivanting in the unknown outside world. Luckily, this story does indeed hold some hope for the future of our feline protagonist, but there are several stories that do not get to enjoy such an ending. So, moral of the story? Maybe put an Air Tag on your cat and collect them after 24 hours outside the home.
 

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Posted by Laurent Shinar

Cats are just like toddlers, there we said it. It has been a long time coming, but the truth needed to be put out there. Because no matter how much we might try to ignore it a creature that loves nothing more than pushing boundaries, causing chaos, demanding food, and then going for a nap, is most closely related to a hooman toddler. Which means that the responsibility of making sure that our cat children do not get loose and lay waste to the world outside is on us. And that is the crux of our story today, which essentially tells the tale of a cat/toddler who has a thing for pretending to run away from home. Now usually this charade is over within a few hours, or at worst when the cat gets hungry and hears the sound of treats.

But on this day in particular the cat saw an opportunity to make a great escape, and it went so well that he had no idea what to do with the rest of the 'run away from home' plan. And just like a toddler who quickly realizes that they do not have the ability to buy food and take care of themselves in the outside world, this catto soon came home with his tail between his legs. But not before his pawrents almost lost their minds.
 

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Posted by Ayala Sorotsky

All cat pawrents know the drill - you hear something clinking suspiciously from the other side of the house, and after a few seconds of silence, you hear a large bang, and immediately after you see your cat zoomie in a woosh right past you, climbing on the first too-high piece of furniture they can find. They might proceed with growling at the blank wall, turning into a crumpled shape that vaguely feline, or setting their ears on airplane mode. And that's after you've found out what they broke, and why, oh why did it bother them that the cup was where it was on the countertops?

Cats are a menace to society, and there's no way we can deny that properly. It's not a piece of knowledge reserved as a highly classified secret by the cat community. It's actually just common knowledge. So there's no need for us to hide it, cat pawrents. No, no, we should embrace it.

That's why this fact is commemorated in cat memes. So many cat memes demonstrate the menace to society, commonly known as "cats", so well. So why won't we all embrace it together today? You know, just like you do every day in your home, with your cat, who's just as a menace as any of these cat memes below. 

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Posted by Ayala Sorotsky

When Monday morning comes, in all its desperate glory, our brains need an itch. But not just a "Here's a cup of coffee, now wake up and go to work" - no. That's the regular people's brain itch, the normies wake-up call, the ordinary brains rattle. That's not the thing that works on the brains of the special specimen or weirdo cat lovers - we need some highly specific brain itch to get us going. And yes, that includes you too, you lovely weirdos of the cat community. We see you. And we got you.

We found the purrfect brain itch for this week: futurustic felines making space music on synths and meowlectronic equipment. Yes, oddly specific, we know. But it's so good. It's not just a background playlist you put while you're clickity-clakity on your little keyboard keys while staring at your screen in the office - it's mewsic. It's a meowsterpiece.

To get your brain itched in the right way, search for your favorite synthwave playlist, hang back, scroll down this galaxy of cats, and enter a whole other space entirely. One where it's not Monday morning. One where Monday mornings don't exist. But there are many cats - which is the best.

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posted by [syndicated profile] in_the_pipeline_feed at 12:39pm on 25/08/2025

After that big lithium-and-Alzheimer’s paper recently, I thought a look at the chemistry of the lithium orotate used therein would be worthwhile. So let’s get into ion behavior for a bit:

As the chemists in the crowd know, there are several general behaviors that you see for ionic compounds in solution. If you think of all ionic substances as fully solvent-separated solvated ions once they're in solution, just ions, all the same, the other possibilities are going to sneak up on you. And these vary according to both the anion and cation, naturally, and according to the concentration, and very much so with the nature of the solvent and whatever other species might be floating around in there (overall ionic strength is certainly a factor, for one). Let’s stick with water as the solvent for the three most distinct classifications:

1. A fully solvated ion pair. That’s what you’d see with (for example) a low concentration of sodium chloride in water. The most energetically favorable state has the sodium cation and the chloride anion each surrounded by their own “solvation shells” of water molecules; it’s like they are each in their own bubbles of slightly-more-orderly water. The ions are not really “seeing” each other at all.

2. A solvent-separated ion pair, which can also be known as an “outer-sphere complex”. In this situation the anion and cation are separated by (pretty much) a single layer of water molecules (or indeed a single water molecule itself). In this case there certainly is an electrostatic interaction between the two anions, but the lowest energetic state of the system includes a solvent molecule in there too.

3. A contact ion pair, which can also be known as an “inner-sphere complex”. Here the anion and cation are right next to each other, fully electrostatically paired. Indeed, this situation can usually be described as “partially covalent”; the interaction is that tight. It’s like the far end of the spectrum of polarized covalent bonds, like drawing a sulfoxide as an S-plus connected to an O-minus. The two ions are surrounded by a common solvation shell of water molecules; there’s nothing between them.

There are several factors that go into the thermodynamics of these states. There’s outright Coulombic attraction (positive charges and negative ones), but note that Coulomb’s Law includes a term in the denominator for the dielectric constant of the medium (so water is going to be rather different than less polar solvents and more apt to separate things). And you’ll also have to keep in mind that your ions are going to have a polarizing effect on those nearby solvent molecules, somewhat cancelling out the situation compared to “naked charges” alone. You’ve also got enthalpic contributions from all those solvation interactions with the water molecules, balanced with the entropy changes that come from making more orderly solvation shells out of those waters. And there’s the loss of entropy that comes from having ions associated with each other rather than swimming around randomly.

OK, now what do we know about lithium orotate’s behavior? I ask because many people (in the comments here and elsewhere) have had a hard time imagining that it can be all that different from any other lithium salt. With lithium chloride or lithium carbonate, you would absolutely expect the two ions to go off on their separately solvated adventures by themselves, so why shouldn’t any lithium whateverate do the same?

It is a question with a surprisingly long and controversial history, which is very well summed up here. and in even more detail in this article. In short, claims were made in 1973 that lithium orotate dosing led to higher CNS concentrations than lithium carbonate dosing. A followup study in 1976 did not confirm this, but another in 1978 apparently did see such differences (up to threefold higher concentrations with the orotate). A 1979 followup, though, suggested that this could be an artifact of impaired renal function after the orotate dosing, and that report seems to have shut down this area of inquiry for some time. More recent toxicological investigations have not seem any such effects, however. In fact, lithium carbonate seems to have more renal toxicity problems itself - it’s possible that lithium orotate is a safer compound, pharmacokinetic and efficacy claims aside.

But what about those pharmacokinetic differences? Are they real, and if so, how does this occur? Well, the PK of lithium salts in general seems to be a battleground (see section 6.1 here). Most lithium dosing in the psychiatric field is lithium carbonate, but that’s due to its easier formulation compared to lithium chloride (it’s non-hygroscopic, i.e. it does not soak up moisture from the air). Lithium chloride itself has some regulatory issues left over from its (over)use in salt substitutes in the 1930s and 40s as well. Lithium citrate is available as a substitute for people who have difficulty swallowing the lithium carbonate caplets, and there are varying reports of whether it has any PK differences compared to the carbonate. Lithium sulfate seems to have no real differences.

Orotate salts, though, may well be a different matter. It’s been observed, for example, that magnesium orotate does not have the laxative effects of common magnesium salts, which suggests that it does not ionize under physiological conditions they way that those do. The lithium/Alzheimer’s paper showed that lithium orotate solutions showed notably lower conductivity than other lithium salt solutions, and that is indeed a measure of their degree of ionization (i.e., more contact ion pairing than for the other salts). It is possible that the lithium-orortate pair is handled as a single substance. At the destination end, there is evidence that orotate is transported via a urate receptor (URAT1) which is found in both the kidney and the choroid plexus (for entry into the brain), and it may be taken up through nucleotide transporters as well. And once in the cell, orotate is already an intermediate in pyrimidine synthesis, which might be a way to finally liberate the lithium counterion.

More needs to be done to shore up all these ideas, but they are not implausible. This paper goes a way towards that, showing that lithium-driven mouse behavioral assays are significantly different with the orotate salt, and that inhibition of anion transport pathways (or of the pentose phosphate pathway for nucleotide synthesis) seem to shut off these effects. So there is reason to think that lithium orotate could indeed be different from other lithium salts, and that these differences are exploitable for its use in lithium supplementation into the CNS. That of course is a separate issue from “Is lithium deficiency the cause of Alzheimer’s” and from “Would lithium supplementation be a useful Alzheimer’s therapy”. But it would behoove us to figure this out in case the answer to either of those latter questions is “yes”.

Posted by Blake Seidel

Every meal of the day is the most impurrtant meal of the day to our cats, but for us hoomans, breakfast is the most impurrtant one. Why? Because it sets the tone for your day. You're fueling your body with vitamins and nutrients to get you through 8+ hours at the office, any after-work errands you have to run, and maybe a gym session if you're lucky. And just like with breakfast, the way you treat your Mondays can affect how you handle the rest of the week. Will you wake up grumpier than a cat who was fed 0.05 seconds after mealtime, or will you start your week with pawsitivity? The choice is yours, and it's simpler than you think.

That's why, especially on Meowndays, we like to treat ourselves to a healthy helping of cat memes. They make our meowrnings brighter, full of giggles, and excitement to send some of them to our partner and say "This is so Loki". Loki is our black cat, and yes, he is equally as mischievous as the Norse God from which his name is derived.

As Monday has already rolled around, we thought it was purrfectly appropriate to bust out the heavy-duty feline funnies to dump some smiles onto your meowrning. May your day be as fluffy as a Persian cat, as silly as an orange one, and as meowrvelous as a Maine Coon. Enjoy!

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Posted by Mariel Ruvinsky

We think that every cat owner knows that… despite what people say, cats are not easy. It takes time to learn their behavior, their patterns, and along the way, you make mistakes. We have certainly made mistakes in the past. One moment, everything is fine, and the next moment, your cat has run away. It happens, and it's heartbreaking, and thankfully, we are among the happy ones who got to reunite with their cats after it happened. We learned our lesson, and we are very, very sure that this veterinarian has learned their lesson too, in a bunch of ways. 

Vets can make mistakes too. Because their human. And we cannot be too mad at this vet for their cat running away because we've been there, and we know how quickly it can happen. We can only say that we are infinitely happy that they got to reunite, and that, beyond that, we are thankful that you got this cat away from the neighbor who essentially stole it. 

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posted by [syndicated profile] icanhascheezburger_feed at 05:00am on 25/08/2025

Posted by Briana Viser

Did someone say good morning? Oh, my mistake, it was just the distant meow of cats yelling out for their beloved breakfast. It's never easy to start the day – from the loud and obnoxious alarm going off, to your whiskered friend pawing you while you're brushing your teeth, the day-today monotony can eat us up from the inside. But why suffer in a sleepy torpor all morning when you can scroll adorable cat memes to abate the nagging and gnawing tiredness? Black cats are specifically special when sitting with your first cup of morning coffee to get your day going. Their superstitious perspicacity gives the day a dose of magic and insight, since they're so entwined with witchy and supernatural qualities. 

Their enchanted aura breathes out of your phone's screen to give you that extra pep in your step when talking to Dave of finance at the office fridge, or when Marge accidently eats your Go-Gurt again. Here's to feline cuties dressed in all black. 

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Posted by Blake Seidel

Cats don't care about anything (except mealtimes, snacks, ear scratches, and that random bottle cap you accidentally dropped and is all of a sudden their furvorite toy), but most of all, they don't care about gender. They don't understand the impawtance we put on "boy names" versus "girl names". We know a pair of pawrents who named their girl cat "Asteroid Destroyer", so tell us, do you think Asteroid Destroyer is a boy or a girl? The answer is: who cares! The only thing that matters is that Asteroid Destroyer is very cute and likes to cuddle. We also have a friend with a girl cat named 'Eddie'. She tried calling her a more "girly name", but she wouldn't respond. We could go on, but we think you get the point.

Anyway, all of this information just makes the Karen's dilemma below even funnier. While at the vet, a pawrent and their orange cat 'Sweet Potato' (great name for an ginger boy, if you ask us), appawrently offended a Karen who assumed their cat Sweet Potato was a girl. She claimed that Sweet Potato is certainly not a boy's name. Rightfully so, the pawrent laughed in her face and explained that cats don't understand the concept of gender, and that Sweet Potato actually really likes her name. 

Did you name any of your cats with a gender non-conforming name? If so, do you think this Karen would have said the same thing to you? We hope so. Scroll down to read more about this hissterical vet's office interaction!

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