Every time I see a video of a cat that’s just meowing constantly, I think about how they developed meowing exclusively as a way to communicate with humans.
Past kittenhood, I mean. Kittens meow for the same reason human babies cry; to tell their mom “I have needs and wants and I’m so so small and I hardly even know it!” But adult cats have other ways to communicate with each other. They only continue to meow because they realize it’s the only part of their language that gets have anything close to the correct response from humans.
Anyway. Whenever I see videos like this where a human and cat are doing that sort of call-and-response routine, like-
*human talks at the cat like its a person*
meow
*human talks at cat like its a person*
meow
-so on and so forth, like I dunno, it just hits different somehow. Like it’s not the same as dogs barking at humans, dogs barking is a “natural” dog instinct (to my knowledge), but adult meowing is a specifically domestic behavior. They developed it for us. They know we can’t really understand them, the same way the mom in this video knows the cat can’t understand her, but they meow at us anyway. And this cat’s plaintive meows are it begging to be set free of the grooming torture, obviously, but sometimes it seems like it’s just a call and response.
Like you’ll see a video of a human talking at a cat, and the cat meows back between sentences, and the cat is like lying with its eyes half closed or sitting with its back turned to the human and it’s meowing back anyway and you stop and think about it and realize that they’re doing the same thing.
The cat and the human talking at each other when they don’t need anything from each other, that’s- that’s just conversation.It’s literally cross-species small talk, because both the cat and the human are engaging in it just for the sake of hearing a response back.
They can’t understand each other at all, but they continue to communicate purely for the sake of communication. For the pleasure of each other’s company. For the sake of socializing with each other. We don’t even understand each other, and it’s still small talk.
And you think about that and you remember again that adult cats without humans don’t meow and it’s just their human company comfort language and you cry.
Oh fuck I’m so sorry I didn’t realize I reblogged this from you lmao
Video description: a tiktok video discussing AO3’s new comment blocking feature.
The video begins by showing a tweet from the Ao3_status twitter account. The tweet reads, “Comment blocking is now live! ” and is responding to the tweet linking the AO3 News post announcing that comment blocking is coming.
The narrator then goes to the comments section on one of her works and points out that there is a new button available. On comments from other users, you can now see a button labelled “Block.”
She taps on the Block button and it takes her to a confirmation page. The confirmation page outlines what blocking will do: stop a user from commenting on your works and stop a user from replying to your comments elsewhere on AO3. It also outlines what blocking will not do: hide that user’s works or bookmarks from you, delete or hide their existing comments on your works, hide their comments elsewhere on the site.
She confirms that she wants to block the user and then returns to her comments section. The button that formerly said “Block” now says “Unblock.” She says you can remove the block on a user by pressing that button again or by tapping on your username at the top of the page and selecting My Preferences from the dropdown menu that appears.
On the My Preferences page, there is now a button labelled “Block users.” After tapping that button, she goes to a new page. On that new page, you can see the user she just blocked and a button next to their username that says “Unblock.”
She taps that button and it takes her to a confirmation page which outlines what will happen if she agrees. Unblocking a user will allow them to comment on your work or to reply to your comments elsewhere on the site. She confirms.
The screen goes back to the Blocked Users page found in My Preferences, and the narrator explains that you don’t need to find a comment from another user in order to block them. If you’d like, you can type their name into the text box provided and block them directly from that page.
Not shown: you can also block a user from that user’s profile page.
If you’d like to know more about more blocking and muting features that are planned, read the News post linked above.
