The humanization and anthropormizing of cats is an interesting phenomenon that seems to be increasing due to social media. We are becoming ancient Egypt. The public can share the link to this.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTai9lLCR0H/?igsh=M2ZvOGljenpicm1p
E. Writer
When I released The Absence of Reality, I made the Introduction and Preface to Reality Unbound available to the public through a free sample on Google Play. For anyone who has ever been curious about what it entails, they can read it here, it's open to read on screen. Ignore that summary below. It's parsing weird on Neighbahood. Google presents the text in a two page layout. I think Google also double spaces it for some inexplicable reason.
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=0-6bEQAAQBAJ&hl=en
This is my favorite live performance from Whitney Houston. Every person in that room was riveted. She was such an amazing singer and performer That is all I can say. Her voice was so powerful when she sang, the entire lower part of her face would shake from the vibrato. And to think, she sang with such perfection while singing live. One thing I loved about Whitney is that she always incorporated old jazz standards like I Love You Porgy into her performances, or Loverman.
Alex Morton What a voice! I was a fan of her mother, Cissy Houston, long before Whitney came on the scene. The sweet apple fell directly under the tree.
Alex Morton I just realized that I don't really know how to post youtube videos on Neighbahood.
E. Writer You just have to paste the link and it will autogenerate the video. But I think with yours you did not hit enter afterwards. I'm not sure if they work in comments, but I could have sworn I posted a link in comments before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtzyxoX0To0
E. Writer Wow, I've never heard Cissy Houston's version of Midnight Train to Georgia. This is one of my favorite songs (Gladys Knight and Diana Ross follow Whitney as my favorite singers). Cissy sounds so pure and beautiful.
Yikes! It's unnerving deleting all of my other social media. Not unnerving because of the social media platform itself, but the history of what is on those accounts and all of the memories it holds, and the timeline it has kept of my life. I just deleted one of my two Instagram accounts. One is a private one and the other is for my author account and book announcements. I deleted my author one first, because I rarely used it.
But my private IG, I have so many videos of me gardening and one precious video where I am saying goodbye to my cat as he lay dying of old age. I stopped posting on this account about two years ago, when FB implemented a policy requiring users to pay for a verification check. If you did not buy a blue check mark, they hid your videos from your followers. I was not paying them anything so I stopped using Instagram. It only remained because of the memories and sentimental videos. I love looking at old pictures of my garden and watching videos where I am harvesting vegetables. There are cooking videos and art projects, too. Sentimentality can be a burden in a time when I want to make changes. But in 2026, I am severing ties to that which does not bring joy to my life.
I also shared that I am deleting my FB account. The first stage is to reducing my friends list from 144 to 5 to 10 core people in my life. The last time I purged my account was ten years ago when I removed hundreds of FB friends and reduced my profile to 144. Now I will reduce it to almost nothing. Truthfully, I interact with about 5 to 10 people regularly. I shared why I was removing everyone (because FB is pointless), and also because I don't want any connections to be Big Tech. Other than my books, I want to erase my digital footprint...which to these companies, is a bit of gold.
Roy Scarbrough It's sad that Facebook enshitification has come to this. they seem to be on a tear with them disabling your business account. I don't want to make this about me, or our immediate circle, but it does seem that they have targeted half the people who I regularly talk to.
E. Writer Indeed, and if you run ads, they lower your reach if you don't upload a photo or video is the new rule.
The thing that I love about Neighbahood is that it gets to be 😴 boring in a good way. As a social media platform it works best for the self-disciplined, for people who choose to give each other grace. I long for peace, wherever I may be. In this digital space or in reality.
TBH, I wished people used the forum. We need another IMDB. I miss that site. You could go there and just chat about movies or TV shows. Today's generation will never know the joys of going to see a moving and heading straight to IMDB to have a discussion about it with thousands of people posting about the same movie. And the only movie you're talking about is the forum for the movie you're posting about. I remember spending countless hours talking about movies. You can't really post on forums there anymore, but I do post user reviews on IMDB whenever I stream a TV show.
E. Writer I just looked, it was posted in "how to use this forum" under movie talk.
Roy Scarbrough That's an old one. I tried again in the Television category. It just disappeared on send.
E. Writer Oh maybe it didn't go through
Roy Scarbrough no. It appears I missed a step. Looks like you have to first create a separate "topic" within the "category." I didn't know to do that.
E. Writer Ohhh ok. Like a subject line.
I just took a quick spin around the solar system.
I enjoy watching the solar system via Nasa's EYE on the SOLAR SYSTEM page. It's a 3D rendering of the solar system. You can click and zoom in and out on each body, and read factoids about the planets and sun. while also manually moving 3D image relative to its position orbiting sun. You can control the layers, such as turning on the constellations, asteroids, and comments, turning off the trails (lines), or turning them on. I usually turn them all, leaving only the orbits.
E. Writer That had to be really cool. I had an experience back in 2007. I used a digital camera and placed a telescope lens over the camera lens and aimed it at the sky. I took a lot of pictures, and I saw these odd shapes, a bit fuzzy like TV snow but not as buzzy and close together. Some deep reds, etc. It was hard to see because the sky was dark. Some had odd shapes. So I had myspace at the time and I uploaded the images, while joking that I had captured an alien aircraft and zoomed in one some of the shapes. What I realized in hindsight was that, I was probably looking at stars and other celestial bodies with the extra zoomed in images that I took. I saw similar shapes on a show about the universe years later. I have tried to recreate the shots I took over the years with other cameras and telescope lenses, but I have never been able to do it. Even worse, that digital camera was nowhere near as close to as advanced as cameras today, including our phone cameras.
Alex Morton I was on the balcony a few years ago with my wife's cousin, John Moraitis, an actor who now lives in London and we were celebrating a call he'd just gotten gotten from his agent that he'd be playing the part of Lear in a production that would be touring England and then travelling to Japan. It was a night of celebration. As he told me about his joy, a huge, very bright object streaked across the sky, like nothing we'd ever seen. We never found out what it was, but every time I see him, it's the first thing we talk about. An interesting sidelight to this is that Mark Antokas, an old friend, just published a book called Another Noel about when they were young and he and John sold Christmas trees together on the streets of New York.
E. Writer Ahhh, the beauty and splendor of not being besieged by artificial light. I live in a state that is not besieged by too much light pollution but the problem is that we have cloudy skies, almost always at night. And so many trees, that I can never get a good angle. My backyard is pitch black at night. It's only a little over a quarter acre, but because there's nothing back there it's so dark. But with all of the trees back there towering, I can't get a good look at stars, which has rendered my telescope from every position almost useless. I have thought about going to the lake one night to point the camera, but there's the background skyline that would interfere.
Alex Morton
I shot the cover picture for Somewhere Else from my front yard in Ikaria.
E. Writer I did not realize that was a shot that you had personally taken. How cool.
E. Writer I treat cats like children. I have a habit of anthropormizing because they are so smart. But this video literally has the kitty talking in the voice of a small child. it's cute but creepy at the same time.
Roy Scarbrough There's a talking dogs youtube channel that has gone viral that's gone viral. Goldie and Frenchie are two podcast bros, wearing head phones and speaking into mics, A golden retriever and a french bulldog. They interview guest dogs, crack stupid jokes and laugh at each others dumb jokes the way podcast bros do. I love it,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oChKGR4phwc
E. Writer This is like Dogs playing poker. Interestingly, society has been making paintings and even the Puppy Bowl for a long time. But with cats it the anthropomorphizing feels different. Like the video I linked shows a kitty talking in a child's voice. It immediately appeals to human instinct to protect it. Like this one: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DTu5ZYYDO09/
Alex Morton I like the occasional cat, and then I like that one a lot. The rest? I'm as apathetic toward them as they are to me. Primarily, I'm on the same wavelength as dogs. I'm an empath.
E. Writer I've only known some very affectionate cats. They are only apathetic to people they don't know, on top of being fiercely independent. We have one kitty who likes to be cradled like a baby.. she will climb into a person's arms and lay there. Or snuggle on your lap. My son's girlfriend gave her to us because she didn't like her anymore and said she was putting her out if someone didn't come get her. She was not spayed at the time and spraying. We took her off of her hands and that cat was really angry, wouldn't let us go near her without hissing. We figured she was angry about losing her home and being around strangers. A month later we had her fixed and she had to rest. That gave her time to bond with us. And she's been a sweet affectionate lap kitty ever since. Cats 🐈 simply have to get to know you first. Funny thing, a couple months later the girlfriend had regrets about giving her up. But whenever she would visit our house the kitty would hide from her. She learned to hide from our other cats. When she finally saw the girlfriend face to face, she hissed. The subject of getting her back never came up again, plus our answer was no anyway.