The Journal Of E. A. Kolb

You may have read already from my Twitter feed or from

galactose 's journal, but our dear cat Murray was put to sleep on Friday afternoon. 

 

Murray's Photo Gallery

Why?
If you knew Murray, his digestive woes won't be news to you. Murray has long had some kind of intestinal condition that caused him to yelp whenever he passed gas or had to potty. Sometime after we moved to Knoxville, this condition worsened. He had become unable to use the box properly and eventually lost control over his bowels more or less completely.

Back in August 2007, the master bathroom became Murray's room. We would put him in there overnight and whenever he started acting like he needed to go. We didn't have a lot of options at this point, as we were scrubbing our carpets for hours every night. With him in the bathroom, at least we could clean that more easily once a week and it would be manageable.

But things continued to get worse. Since the turn of the new year, things have just been pretty awful. He had to spend more time in the bathroom than out. He would routinely be covered in his own poop and we couldn't clean him every day. Whenever he had a bath, he would make himself sick right afterwards and generally end up with some kind of ick back on him right away. He'd lost over half his body weight and was having problems keeping food in and processing it properly when he could eat. To make things worse, he caught a cold at some point and would sneeze violently. He actually sneezed off a patch of fur by his nose.

And eventually, we realized that Murray was no longer able to be the cat he wanted to be, the cat I want to remember. I've seen cats die from organ failure, and it's agony for the animal. I did not want him to endure months more of this hell for both him and for us, only to finally succumb to organ failure in the end.

Murray Kolb (1996?-2008)
When we adopted Murray, he was about five years old. Kristen and I had been volunteering at the Champaign County Humane Society shelter when we first encountered him. It was uncommon to see a cat of a particular breed (except the occasional siamese or Russian blue) in the shelter, so we were immediately drawn to him. When we took him into the visiting room, he was so glad for the company let alone from two people, the only thing he could do was try to sit on both our laps at the same time.

When we adopted him, we were between apartments. We were in the process of moving out from the apartment where we were living with
nagash and into the apartment where we lived with doomsey. We were staying a night or two at uofirob's and hiding Murray from the landlord.

Murray was a very special cat, and I think those of you who had a chance to meet him can testify to this. Murray would get people emotionally invested in him who, previously, wouldn't have a thing to do with cats. Kristen's parents, who hated cats, adopted one of their own after spending a week with Murray.
The things I'm going to miss about Murray:

• He would crawl into blankets to get comfy, even if it was right next to me in bed.
• Early on, I would tickle Kristen and Murray, misinterpreting the sound for an attack, would bite at my head to protect Kristen.
• Whenever company came over, Murray made shoe duty a priority. He loved people's feet, especially statichd3's.
• Murray wasn't much of a jumper, but he was a fervent explorer. You put him somplace new (or even some place familiar) and he would have to explore it. This lead to more than a few poorly executed jumps from the kitchen table in Urbana to the counter top. Kind of a "skitter skitter thud" sound.
• Ribbons were the cheapest and best cat toy you could find for Murray. He loved catnip as much as the next cat, but he couldn't resist pulling the ribbons off the presents Kristen would carefully wrap for people.
• He was the best lap cat ever.

There's so many reasons why Murray was awesome. He was more than a cat for us -- he was family. It hurts like hell to have him gone, but I have no doubts that we made the right decision. You see, we were already missing Murray -- it was worse to have him on the other side of a few walls, unable to come and be himself.

I will remember him fondly.

If you've not heard, Arthur C. Clarke -- one of the hallowed masters of Science Fiction and an frequent unintentional-but-uncanny predictor of Science Reality -- passed away today at age 90. If you're not familiar, this is the man who gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey and its successors. This is the man who dreamed up geostationary satellites before the rocket scientists did.

Athur gave us Clarke's three laws of prediction:
1.) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2.) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You should have heard #3 somewhere before now. This is the man who coined the phrase.

Please, if you're not familiar with his works, take the time to pay your respects.

Today is a sad day for science fiction indeed.

Yesterday, we buried a friend. A foolish, selfish friend, but a friend nonetheless.

New Orleans as we know it is gone forever. The city is underwater, and still sinking. Of course, I do not believe it will no longer be on the map of the United States when my future children start learning basic US geography, but what it was is forever changed.

We all know of the disaster that has taken place. It is one of the two greatest plausible nightmare scenarios here in the US that has made scientists cringe for years - a category five hurricane hitting New Orleans pretty much dead on. We've known about it, and we've known there was nothing we could do about it. All we could do is pray that it would never happen. Some people wonder why I'm not a man of prayer.

Contribute!Now that it has happened, it should be a time for action, for unity of purpose. There are some things, I believe, that are worse than death. Our kind has thousands of years of learning how to deal with death. Capitalism and material accumulation, however, are relatively new concepts. We invest so much of ourselves into our things and when those are stripped from us we become truly naked, truly vulnerable. The sad truth I'm suggesting, then, is that we are better at coping with the loss of life than we are at coping with the destruction of ourselves.

New Orleans is more than a beautiful, historic place. There are approximately 1.3 million people who call the greater New Orleans area their home, and let's not even get into the areas of Mississippi and elsewhere that have been utterly decimated by Hurricane Katrina. That's 1.3 million lives that have been touched in a profound way even I'm not fully able to comprehend. I don't even think 'touched' is the right word for it. 'Visciously maimed' might be more apt.

From where most of us sit, which is the comfortable armchair-land of Far Far Away, there isn't a lot we can do. We can't drive down there ourselves and help. Even if we were within distance to do that, we couldn't get in - for valid safety reasons, New Orleans is a forbidden Atlantis to all but emergency personnel. There is something we can do, however. Donate to the Red Cross. It's needed. Even if it's a small donation, it's help. Be patient and persistent, though. As you might imagine, the Red Cross website is getting lots of traffic, so their servers are straining under the excess traffic.

I wanted to get that out of the way and say it first, because the rest of what I have to talk about is angry stuff. As I said above, this should be a time for unity and oneness of cause. And yet some of the worst faults of our kind have reared their ugly heads through this disaster in very large ways. Please note that a lot of this has been discussed in other journals already and my contribution here is to further awareness of these issues.

Black People Loot, White People FindAh, the semantics of covert racism. Euphemism and dysphemism. The little things that belie a big, fat prejudice...

I'm sure many of you have been made aware of the looting and salvaging that's been going on since the hurricane passed. I'll draw the distinction between the two. Salvaging is people breaking into stores that sell foodstuffs in order to acquire needed foodstuffs. The store owners can't open the store for business, nor will they be able to recover the goods before they go bad anyway. The people doing this are generally doing it to feed their families because they weren't able to get out of the city. Looting is people stealing goods without any kind of mitigating circumstance. For instance, just about any electronic goods. No one needs those to survive, so stealing them is criminal through and through. Likewise, the people who have been making off with sacks of cash from the floating casinos that have washed ashore are looters.

Having made that distinction, look at how the Associated Press and the AFP are portraying this in their image captions: ( Images )

In the first image, we see a white person "looking through his shopping bag" while the black person is jumping through the broken window. In reality, both of them did the same amount of "shopping" in that store, yet the white person is being portrayed as though he's just a bystander. More telling are the next two images. You can imagine these photos were taken about 30 feet apart from each other. The white people "found" food in a grocery store, but the black guy "looted" it?

The Art of Fact is supposed to be as unbiased as possible. In its purest form, it tells us things none of us want to acknowledge. It does this not by how it portrays reality, but by the reality it portrays. The goal is to call a spade a spade.

What we're seeing here is unequal treatment of fact. This salvaging is an ugly reality of the situation. If I were unable to get out of the city before this thing, you'd damn well better believe I wouldn't be too proud to steal from a closed store to keep my family alive. But the people who have been brought to this are all the same. The press working to separate the white folks from the black folks through the measured use of words is not only deplorable, it's cowardly.

The Associated Press and the AFP both need to be called on this blunder. Contact information for the AP is either by email or found online. The AFP contact info is found online.
Further insight on this matter: LJ: zarfmouse, LJ Community: blackfolk, Boing Boing.

President PaperweightIt takes the practical annihiliation of a major US city to get President Bush home from vacation. So sorry to be a bother. Anyhow, in case you were wondering what he's been doing in light of this massive disaster, here's a little insight for you. Now, as much as I don't like President Bush (and, indeed, never have), I've never been one to draw parallels between him and people like Hitler or Nero. In generally, I find that kind of rhetoric trite. But this guy's got a fair point. Not even the bodies of Americans floating through the streets of one of its cities will get in the way of the smilingh, charismatic delivery of the almighty political agenda!

Beyond that, however, I've heard that Bush has tapped the strategic national oil reserve. Well, that's good news. Pity it means fuck-all to anyone. Gas prices have broken the $3.00 locally. When I started driving, I was paying less than a dollar per gallon. In my lifetime of driving (which is all of 8 years) gas prices have risen more than 200%, and half of that price inflation has occured in the last 365 days! Are you still glad you elected a president who is benefitting directly from this price inflation? Because I'm sure as hell not.


The AfflictedLast but not least, I wanted to link to a journal of a New Orleans resident who is, of course, caught up in all of this. He's got some profound insight into the situation that's really worth taking note of.

ThanksThanks to everyone whose links and insight contributed to this entry. There's far too many to name, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.

A couple of gaming world quickies for you here. Nothing ground breaking; I've just had these bulletins sitting in my inbox marked as unread until I'm finally getting around to posting about them just now.

Switching To Decaf

Cross posted from my journal at deviantART; the first person plural references pertain to that community in particular. The person I've written about was a volunteer under me at DA when I was managing the help staff before the January reorganization.

I was just informed that Neil Braithwaite - known better to most of us as `randomcasualty - passed away a few days ago. I know not from what, but I'm told he was a victim of cancer. Really, there's very little I know about the circumstances, but I'm in the process of learning when any services will be, where I can send flowers, and so on. Here's what I do know, however:

I brought `randomcasualty on to staff a long time ago as one of the first help staffers. He was a massive help in reforming the customer service reputation for the company with regards to the website, since prior to his efforts and those of his team mates, help desk requests were responded to whenever people had the time to.

He was an easy candidate for the team because, if you recall, Neil basically was the only real FAQ deviantART had for a time - the official one was static and vastly outdated. Once he joined DA staff, I worked with him and some of the developers to produce the first official FAQ system, which Neil introduced his material into and managed heavily for a time. I have no way of verifying any more, but I expect that much of what you will find in the FAQ at +help today is the result of his efforts.

As time marched forward, Neil grew more distant from the site. My understanding was that the pressures of life outside DA were simply leaving him with less and less time to contribute here. This is, anyway, what he told me. I never knew the seriousness of his condition (or even that he had cancer at all) until now; if it was the cause of that drift, I can appreciate that as well.

In January, deviantART, Inc did some internal reorganization and, as the new Director of Artist Relations, I needed to tighten up the bolts so to speak, and I was put in a position where I had to remove a number of people from staff. By that time, Neil was spending much more time away from DA than he was at DA and we agreed that he would leave staff at that time.

I didn't have a great deal of contact with Neil since then. Like any human being, I had my own set of things to carry on about and I never really had much of an opportunity to catch up with him. I regret that. I hope, however, that he was able to spend his last few months with his family, and I will always remember the lasting changes he helps pioneer here at deviantART.

Neil was more than a senior member, more than a staff member. He was a part of this community, and the role he played was by no means small. As a community, we have dealt with loss before. Personally, however, never has someone who had been so near to me, someone whom I worked on this site with so closely left us in this sense.

I pray he has found peace in death and is now privy to the answers to a host of mysteries that will haunt you and I for years to come.

"Words are kind, they helped ease the mind of this, my old friend. And though you gotta go we'll keep a piece of your soul. One goes out; one goes in." - Jack Johnson, If I Could.

Appreciate life today.
Appreciate life tommorrow.
And the day after that, come back and read this again.



Ion Storm is dead. Long live Ion Storm.