#also yes i realize probably nobody cares for a long post of my stats but. tough.

[robocracker]

I posted 1,864 times in 2022

That's 384 more posts than 2021!

54 posts created (3%)

1,810 posts reblogged (97%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@medievalthymes

@ocopio

@stickyyong

@psikonauti

@pendraegon

I tagged 819 of my posts in 2022

#kinnporsche - 220 posts

#art - 168 posts

#cats - 98 posts

#killing eve - 55 posts

#his dark materials - 28 posts

#ygo dm - 25 posts

#all of us are dead - 20 posts

#sweet home - 17 posts

#dogs - 17 posts

#around the world in 80 days - 15 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#you probably also annoy your followers when you liveblog your discovery of a basic tumblr feature that they no doubt already know all about

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

okay so on one level i can appreciate that Casualty has Paula's baby taken in the same episode that Robyn finds out she's pregnant, especially with that moment on the two benches, with Dylan representing Paula's desire to keep her child, and Robyn so obviously not wanting to be pregnant...

but god, just once i'd like to see a character get pregnant, decide to abort, and be done with it. not every pregnancy on tv needs to be a drawn-out drama where the only inevitable option is keeping it!

17 notes - Posted February 7, 2022

#4

a really big part of me wants this kid to open the door to the roof - obviously, because i’ve spent seven episodes getting attached to this group, you can’t let them die now!

but then there’s another part of me that still vividly remembers being a 6-10 year old girl getting the shit kicked out of me on a regular basis, while the other students just laughed and let it happen.

would i have opened the door?

17 notes - Posted January 30, 2022

#3

finally started watching kinnporsche, and it’s only been a day but i already want five more seasons of this shit

30 notes - Posted June 25, 2022

#2

after all the shit he’s pulled, there’s something very lovely about watching gwinam lose his fucking mind from ear-ache

35 notes - Posted January 30, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

so my family’s got the funeral on (they’re not royalists), and while i’m not watching the ceremony, i did catch bits of the procession to the abbey. and i just...

look. i knew it was gonna be ridiculous. but i didn’t expect it to feel unsettling on two different fronts.

first there’s the obscene wealth and pageantry of the crown. ordinary people had their funerals cancelled today, out of ~respect~, and all i can think about is how much time and money those people had to pay in the middle of a cost of living crisis, that will now have to be done again because of rescheduling. there are people who might not be able to attend those rescheduled funerals because they could only get time off work/school for the original date. all of these ordinary people having to make time for logistics in the midst of their grieving. meanwhile, one family gets to take precedence over everyone else, on an unimaginable scale.

it’s insane to me how many people there were for the queen’s procession. not people attending the funeral, just people following the coffin to the doors. and all of these servicemen looking like robots, everything in perfect sync, from their steps to the goddamn removal of their hats.

but then there’s also the frequent close-up shots of the coffin. and it’s like. don’t get me wrong. i have no sympathy for the woman who was an active participant in the colonialist horrors that this country inflicted on the rest of the world.

but there’s something deeply grotesque to me about her funeral being a televised spectacle. especially with how many close-ups there are of the crown on top of the coffin. really hammers home, quite unintentionally, how utterly unnatural it is to elevate one family over everyone else. millions of people stamped down, and the people at the top are reduced to symbolic objects. whichever way you look at it, humanity loses.

171 notes - Posted September 19, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[dontcallmecarrie]

Replying to the commenters of this post [heads up for angst]:

To @kine-iende, who said:​

hot damn. if "our" justin was a mom-friend in their home-universe, here people would start questioning if justin was in secret a very motherly scrull or something (and be fine with it ^^). but yeah, love the trope too. was it "for the want of a nail" or "through a mirrorm darkly"? well, contrast and a what could have been would be lovely. feel enabled, whenever you want to write this :)

.

I am not very familiar with the concept of Skrulls [...iirc, that’s something introduced in Captain Marvel, which I have yet to get around to], but yeah, that tracks. Assuming it’s a thing they know to look for, though, because here Justin’s being themself is the biggest and most obvious way to establish that they are not canon!Justin.

Sure, they’re identical physically, but the moment either Justin opens his mouth, the jig’s up. 

As is, not five minutes into this strange hellscape where their oldest rival looked at them with no small amount of disdain in his eyes at first, Justin had already managed to charm their way out of holding and into a very relaxed “we’ll keep an eye on him” Avengers custody. 

Well, on paper at least— in reality, most of the team doesn’t really give a damn one way or another, whereas Tony starts out morbidly curious as to just how different NHDD!Justin is to the one he’s used to dealing with, and ends up getting a concentrated dose of All The Feels™ because the moment NHDD!Justin realized this Tony had a metric buttload of undiagnosed-and-constantly-belittled mental health issues and a support system that was equal parts duct tape and caffeine, he went “oh, so this universe is the Hell Timeline, okay, makes sense :) :) :) dammit Ivan you’d better fix this stat”. 

In retrospect, Justin’s not sure when exactly the horror show started; if it was the absolute lack of concern or care the Avengers had for their Tony, or the minute they noticed the gauntness in his face. Maybe the tension between Iron Man and Captain America, or the obvious bravado this Tony used– and the fact that none of the others so much as noticed.

All Justin knows is, a version of someone they care about is hurting, hurting badly and has been for a long time now, and that’s more than enough for them to go “oh, okay, mine now”.

.

For his part, Tony has no idea what the hell’s going on. The non-annoying Justin Hammer who crash-landed an Avengers debrief is...something else, and he’s torn between shock, pleasant surprise, and no small amount of existential angst and jealousy because in the span of a few hours, Tony’s had a brief taste of what some other version of him had for a lifetime, and...

Tony’s not sure how he feels about it. He’s a genius, he can wrap his head around string theory and all that good stuff, but numbers are one thing, having to live with the fact that somewhere out there, a version of him grew up with someone so unfailingly kind and supportive and—Tony can’t think of a better word for it than nurturing— and, in the span of seconds, had been able to call him out on his bullshit and seemed to instinctively push him to be better but not in the demanding way his father or the rest of the world had—

If he thinks about it too long, it makes him want to cry, just a little. Somewhere out there was a Tony who’d been enough for someone, who had never been asked to change himself, who’d been pushed up instead of repeatedly torn down and he didn’t know how to deal. 

He’d thought having a non-annoying Justin around would be funny.

This was not, it was goddamn distressing is what it was, because Tony hadn’t even known it was a possibility but now he is acutely aware of the fact that he got stuck with his Justin— the human embodiment of one of those yappy dogs who nipped at people’s heels thinking they were so tough, despite not being able to back it up.

This Justin was, uh, not that. Tony wasn’t sure if he was always like this, or if it was only with him because he shared a face with someone Justin cared about, but... was he always this much of a mom friend? And where’d that granola bar even come from, anyway? Not that he minded, it was a nice change of pace, but really?

...Tony was really going to miss him, once they figured out a way to send him back home.

.

To the commenter who said:

Stephanie isn’t a canon character, is she? Because if not, NHDD!Justin might be able to pull off a “the birth of my little sister awakened my previously deeply buried parental instincts” to explain his whole… [gestures uselessly].

.

Technically, she could be, in that Justin Hammer has a sister and nephew in canon [according to the wiki and a deleted scene, apparently]. I chose to make her a younger sibling in NHDD, to really emphasize the ‘reincarnated with shitty memory’ aspect of this AU. Specifically, while it’s never specified, Justin’s past life was...not great, and part of it was the fact that their younger sibling was sick. 

With what, they don’t remember anymore, but sick enough that they know health isn’t something to take for granted; sick enough that towards the end, they remember their parents had to choose between paying hospital bills and electricity, remember going to bed hungry because meds were expensive and their next paycheck wasn’t until Friday.

...suffice it is to say, there’s a reason Justin’s so protective of those he cares about, even if his memories faded a bit on the specifics as time went by.

To be fair, canon!Justin also cares for his sister and nephew; it’s just that NHDD!Justin acted more like a third parent than a sibling, once Stephanie was born. 

Bear in mind that canon!Justin’s situation is very different than NHDD!Justin’s, because canon!Justin was basically set up to fail from the start as a normal kid who was constantly compared to a child prodigy two years younger than him and terrible parents. While NHDD!Justin’s situation is similar on the surface, the difference is they’re literally a reincarnated OC, with all the baggage that entails.

Maybe, if their second life hadn’t been surrounded by adults with A+ Parenting Skills, 0/10 Do Not Recommend, their issues and traumas from last time wouldn’t have been exacerbated. If they’d been born to a regular family, Justin would’ve been a good kid but nothing special, and their memories of a past life would’ve faded away by the time they hit puberty.

But instead, they were born to the Hammer family, and proceeded to be put through the wringer. 

Which is bad enough, and meant they immediately started leaning hard on everything from their past life because these people wouldn’t know good parenting if it bit them on the nose, but...then Justin’s little sister was born, which immediately kick-started every older sibling instinct they’d ever had because last time they’d been responsible for their younger sibling’s health and safety and you can probably see where this is going. 

aka yes, some of Justin’s behaviors could arguably be called trauma responses and/or coping mechanisms and it’s something I only realized as I was writing this, and no, this AU was not supposed to be this messed up

Justin’s responsibility, their willingness to deal with shitty parents and do tremendous amounts of emotional labor if it helped anyone they took under their wing? That’s no accident, that’s what happens when a soul has to be the adult, has to step up because nobody else is going to. There’s a reason Justin has so much disdain for Hank Pym and Howard Stark’s immaturity, why they have so little patience for their parents as time goes on; their mental age means the older they get, the more they’re looking at the adults around them and judging them hard.

...ahem. Sorry for getting a bit off-topic, but hey, at least now you know a bit more about what’s going on inside Justin’s head!

And yeah, if he had to bs an explanation for why he’s such a mom friend, Justin’d be more than happy to point to his little sister as an excuse. So long as they know she exists, anyway; if not, he’ll just laugh it off and try to chalk it up to one of the differences between their universes.

.

edit to remove the stuff that got through my nonexistent brain-to-mouth filter because I was averaging a not-optimal amount of sleep as I got used to my new job

[joshuamadrid]

Josh Madrid – JetSetFly’s 8 Step ‘Personal Business Branding & Affiliate Marketing’ Cheat Sheet for 2020

What Exactly Is A PERSONAL BRAND?

You already have a personal brand right now. If you google your name online that’s whatever your personal brand is. Whatever comes up, high school team stats, jail records, social media. Whatever you search online when someone searches your name that’s your personal brand. Everybody has one, some people have ones that are profitable, while others not so much. Maybe it’s going negative and hurting your bank account.

Search me online, you’ll find major publications like Forbes, Huffington Post, ABC, NBC News, Wikipedia, my website, my YouTube, and social media. You can find everything there, so that’s the type of personal brand you guys want.

When you start building your personal brand, the bigger you get you’ll want to make sure you have a more solid brand, no matter what. You’ll always have haters, you’ll always have people talking shit on you and people might try to say negative things about you online. That’s why if you have a strong personal brand, it doesn’t matter what’s online that’s negative, because of the solid stuff, the positive stuff that’s actually true stomps that out.

Just to make it clear you DO NOT NEED to be rich to build your brand.

Channels

The first thing you’ll want to do when building your personal brand is channels. You have to know what channels you’re using (This information is very important so you should be taking notes.).

What do I mean by channels, if you went to build a really strong personal brand, you need to be on every single channel?

A channel is a social media platform, and content creating the platform. For example, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Sound Cloud, Podcast, and twitter.

Here’s the reason why you can’t have a strong brand on Facebook and Instagram if it doesn’t connect to other platforms. Not everybody is going to follow you because everyone isn’t on your favorite platform. This is why you have to realize when building a personal brand that, yes it’s for you, yes it’s for your brand but it doesn’t matter what you want or likes. You’re building your personal brand so other people, maybe people of higher stature buy your products, people who would want to work with you, so they know who you are.

It doesn’t matter if your favorite platform is Instagram or YouTube if you aren’t on Facebook and that’s where all the people who need to see your personal brand are at, then it doesn’t matter. You have to be on every single platform. Make sure you have these platforms written down. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Medium, Sound Cloud, iTunes, YouTube.

Content

JetSetFly scammed by the 9to5Scam vultures. This was made on fiverr.com for $5 and is great for personal branding.

The next thing you’ll want to do is you’ll want to have content.

You may have heard the phrase “Content is king.”

To build a strong personal brand you have to push your content out to the different channels. When you have content, the thing you have to realize is that once you start creating content you have to be consistent on how much you post, how often you post, and the quality of the post. For me I post on Instagram 5–6 times a week, so if I were to not post for an entire week, then I come back, my followers are going to recognize that and they are not going to build brand loyalty. If you want a strong personal brand you’ll need brand loyalty.

I usually post on YouTube 3–4 times a week. If I don’t post on YouTube 3–4 times, I’m going to start losing subscribers and lose momentum. People are going to realize I’m not a reliable source and not constant with the content I put out.

Snapchat every single day and night. 24 hours around the clock, you’re always going to see something on my Snapchat story and Instagram story. It will never ever be blank, not if I’m dead, dying, or sick. I’m always going to have content around my story. My followers know I’m always going to have content on my story. They will never be disappointed if they go. Maybe it might be a little less than tomorrow or it might be a little bit more the next day but there’s always going to be content there.

My followers will see me as a reliable source, someone they can trust, that’s very key if you want to build and make money with your personal brand. Your audience needs to trust you, my audience and supporters, the people that are apart of this community know that I’m always going to be pushing out content.

Not only do you have to put out content, but you also have to put out relevant content. Whatever audience you want, whatever niche target audience which you are trying to target, you need to put out content that is relevant to it.

On YouTube, I’m trying to build an audience around people who want to live a free lifestyle, people who want to create additional income, entrepreneurs, and people who want to become their own boss.

What am I creating content around? I’m creating content around my lifestyle around me, how I’m my own boss, so people can see that and learn how to do it.

Instagram, I want people to become motivated, I want people to work, I want people going out there and achieving their dreams the same way I have done for myself and the same way I’m doing every single day.

So what do I post? Motivational content, inspirational content, my life, my journey, I talk about it on my Instagram and Snapchat, about how what I have to go through to get where I am at. Again Content needs needs needs to be consistent.

This is key, this is crucial if you want to make money off your personal brand, you have to expand it.

A lot of people, I see this as a common problem, they think that they can just post good pictures, post some good captions, post it on their story every once in a while but they never expand. They think that their 1k, 4k, 10k, 20k followers are enough and by posting good stuff you’re going to grow.

You want to grow you have to put in the work. I used to put 6, 8, 9, 10 hours into building my brand, on top of the 8–10 hours I was putting into building my business. I knew how equally important it is to have a brand as well as a business. The brand will be here 10 years from now the brand might not. You have to be able to expand.

Building a personal brand works very well on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, twitter every platform like I said. The two biggest and easiest platform that I would start with if I were you today, in the next 24, that you can start building your personal brand would be Facebook and Instagram.

Freeways to build on Facebook

Here’s what you want to do, let’s say you’re in the entrepreneur niche, maybe you’re in affiliate marketing, maybe drop shipping, maybe you’re in SMMA, this is what you want to do. Nobody knows this little secret but its very simple. This is how you build free traffic, huge audience, and a huge following, all you do is search your niche and you find Facebook groups in your niche.

Again, before you do this step you have to have the channels right, you have to have a Facebook account, Instagram account, you have to have that good content that is consistent. Then you can expand.

After you have good content you’ll want to go to Facebook and search to make money online, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, drop shipping, SMMA and find Facebook groups. There are tons of Facebook groups that have 5k, 10k, 20k, 100k people in these groups. A lot of these groups get spammed, they get spammed a lot to be completely honest with you guys, its pretty annoying but here’s how you filter out the spam and actually build your audience around people who are quality people.

What you’re going to want to do is go to these Facebook groups, look at all the posts made in the last week and look at the one that has the most engagement. Its probably going to be someone with a success story or someone with free value, its usually those type of things. Look at everyone who liked it and everyone who commented. These are the most engaged people inside the Facebook group.

Very simple, click click click, you add everybody that liked that post without commenting on that post. If you do this in 6–10 Facebook groups next thing you know you’ll have 5,000 friends.

Next step after you have 5,000 friends, that’s a lot of stuff on your news feed and a lot of people you don’t know, but that’s a lot of people who are interested in the same thing you’re interested in. Once these people are engaged, once they love your stuff, once they are commenting on your stuff and following you, you can use a friend remover or defriend them and re-add people again, but this comes later.

Instagram, what’s a free way to do it?

Follow and unfollow people.

A Very simple trick not a lot of people do it because it takes a long time. I built a brand back in 2014 on Instagram following and unfollowing accounts from my local area sold that Instagram page for a couple of thousands of dollars and it only had 10,000 followers, but it was a very high target niche, that’s the power of Instagram. I did that in high school when Instagram wasn’t even that cool.

Let’s say I want to be in the real estate industry or the sales industry, I’m going to look at who engaged with Grant Cardone’s pictures and videos on his Instagram. I’m going to follow all of them and if they follow me back, I might stay following them or I might unfollow then, it just depends.

You can make a lot of connections this way, people are going to connect with you, but again your content has to be relevant to what they are interested in, whether its real estate or sales.

So you use the follow and unfollow strategy on Instagram, you can follow up to 7,500 people, then you can’t follow people anymore. But be careful with this because if you go too fast and you follow people too fast, Instagram will block you from following people.

You want to scale, the first day follows 5 people, the third day following 15, and you want to increase by 5’s. Once you get up to 50 starts going up by 10–20, then 100 a day, 150 a day, 200 a day. You want to increase scale, by the end of the month maybe you can follow like 200 a day. I think you can do 300 actions a day, so 200 follows and 100 unfollows would be 300 actions, so you’ll want to do that. But don’t start off too fast, don’t get too excited, don’t go the following everybody, you will get blocked and it’s going to ruin your entire plan.

Instagram follows and unfollow and Facebook is adding everybody that is active inside of the groups that are related to your niche.

Paid strategies are very simple. Instagram you can run paid ads or you can run shutouts. Find an account that is related to your niche, say that I like cars, I’m going to find a car account, send them a picture of a car, and ask for a shout out.

Show them a picture of my car, because that’s the niche I’m trying to build. They might say its $20, or $200, I’m going to pay the amount, I’m going to get the followers, they are going to follow me and now they will be apart of my brand.

For Facebook, you’ll want Facebook ads. Facebook ads are very cheap to run, as long as you know how to run them.

Engage

If these people are following you and you’re following them back. You’re going to want to engage with their content. Facebook post, you’re scrolling down and you see all these people and somebody says “Hey just made my first $10k mouth”. You comment “Congrats dude! I’m on my way there too!” or “Congrats man, good work, keep it up!”.

Somebody posts a picture on Instagram of a picture of their car, “Hey nice car dude! I love that car!”. You want to engage with your audience very actively. Try to get them to engage back, ask them questions, if you want someone to engage back with you to ask them questions, this is how you build a relationship.

That doesn’t build a relationship or your brand. You want to engage with a question.

That’s the same thing with Instagram and Facebook, you want to engage, like people’s photos, spam them, you want them to get to know who you are. You want your profile picture and name popping up in their notifications multiple times because you added them first, they don’t know who you are. So you need them to get familiar with who you are, that’s how you’re going to build your brand.

GIVE

Next thing you’ll want to do is Give Give Give.

What you’ll want to do for 6–12 months, maybe three months at the minimum, just give out free value, free content as much as you can. This is how you build your brand; this is how you assert yourself as an authority figure.

Everybody wants to start a personal brand or sell shit overnight. That’s how you destroy your personal brand, that’s how you damage your brand. For those of you guys just trying to make money quick off your personal brand and not actually provide any real value or not actually change lives and not have a purpose bigger than you, you will fail and you will make no money.

In about 1–2 years you will not be relevant. The way I built my brand I will be relevant 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, I can promise you that, I can put money on that. That’s just the truth because I have done the proper steps.

I see so many people today on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, running ads and trying to sell shit. They haven’t really done anything yet or given out any free value and they think that just because they buy all this designer shit (You don’t always have to flex designer shit.) They buy it, then they try to sell shit and think that’s how you build authority, that’s not how you build authority, but don’t get me wrong designer shit is cool, I have designer shit. That’s not the point, the way you build authority is by giving, giving, giving value.

There are multiple ways you can do this like give out free E-books. You don’t even have to write the E-books, if you do that’s better, that’s what I did, but I heard there are websites out there where you can license E-books, you can buy it, give it out and claim rights, but I’m not really sure how that works.

Collect Emails, the whole reason you’re doing this is to build a community

Write blogs, share blogs (if it isn’t written by you) if you’re the main way they are getting their information, even though it’s not actually by you, they will associate that value with you.

Make videos on Snapchat, Instagram put them on your stories. Give out value, have your captions give out value. Inspire people.

Facebook, make 2–3 statues a day with pure value, motivation, pure relatable content for your target niche. You want people to know that you’re that guy or girl that’s always giving value, helping people, letting others win, putting people before yourself. If you’re inside a Facebook group, provide more value than anyone else. Here’s how you get a lot of followers on Facebook,

I have over 8,000 followers on Facebook and I haven’t even used it in a year, I built a massive following on Facebook in a few months and I made a lot of money on it (probably over a few $100,000). So here’s what you do, you go to Facebook groups, opportunity groups, make money groups, you know niche-targeted groups and provide value, that’s it. No sell, no close, no dm me for more info, trying to sell people on that bullshit, fuck that just give value.

For example, “Guys here are 5 tips” or “Here is an article on how to do this” or “Here’s what I’m doing now and its working.

Just give value, and what’s going to happen?

Everybody is going to like it, everybody is going to comment on it, now you have the most recent and most active post in that group. People are going to start to naturally add you on Facebook, and if you don’t accept their friend request they become followers (That’s how you build your followers.)

Read Full Content Here: https://medium.com/@Jetsetfly/should-i-go-to-college-df8ef74cd6e9

[sirandking]

serious question though. do you have any hc's for sir and king? Like what type of cats they are? or anything? =)

fuck yes? i may not know anything about cats but i love sir and king

sir fat cat is the first cat they get, in andrew’s last year at palmetto

it wasn’t planned in any way whatsoever

just one day andrew and neil went out for a date drive to an empty parking lot to make out to smoke and look at the stars

and there happened to be an animal shelter near that parking lot which they decided to check out so that they could put off going back to palmetto

and one of the cats is this ridiculously fluffy maine coon, recently blind

(he got a severe eye infection and his previous owners couldn’t afford to pay for treatments, so they left him at the shelter)

(the previous owners also named him “fuckface” and were generally pretty abusive)

andrew watches sir run around wildly, crash into another cat, hiss at it a bit, and then immediately scarper when the other cat hisses back

he points this out to neil, saying “maybe you are not a fox nor a raccoon after all. you are a cat”

neil says that it doesn’t matter, because andrew would still kiss him either way

andrew doesn’t dignify this with a response, and instead watches sir sniff at another cat’s toy, get batted away, and then meow at the cat from a safe distance until the other cat gave up and left

neil notices andrew watching this, but he doesn’t think anything of it until several minutes later when he’s about to leave and andrew says “aren’t you forgetting something?”

neil looks over and andrew’s got sir’s adoption papers in his hands

andrew never acknowledges this again, and mostly acts mildly inconvenienced whenever sir is in the room, and most of the foxes assume neil chose the cat and andrew just tolerates it

but sometimes neil catches andrew reading in one beanbag chair and sir curled up in the other

and they’re not close or even looking at each other, but neil can tell they’re bonding

so he watches fondly from the doorway until andrew tells him to stop staring

(”i wasn’t staring” neil blatantly lies. “i bet the cat’s a liar, too” andrew says. “must be why you like him so much,” neil says, and then andrew has to shut him up and sir decides it’s time to leave the room for a bit)

(i wasn’t sure whether i wanted the cats to be adopted before or after palmetto, but then i remembered that in andrew’s last year, he, neil, aaron, nicky, and robin all share a room, and can you imagine trying to fit two cats into that mess? especially since pets are probably banned from fox tower)

 moving on to cat 2:

sir doesn’t actually get a name until they get king

nobody will call the cat “fuckface”, but andrew and neil are content just to call him “you” or “the cat”

(nicky and robin call him “fluffers” or “whiskers” or other silly pet names, but none of them stick)

soon though they start to see sir outside with a stray cat

a stick-thin tortoiseshell with chunks of fur missing and some nasty scars

and the tortoiseshell is leading sir around?? 

(this is pretty soon after sir was adopted, and he’s still not really used to being blind, especially outside, but the tortoiseshell is dutifully teaching him how high to jump to land perfectly on a fence or when to avoid sudden poles)

at one point andrew sees neil staring at the two cats with this look on his face

and neil doesn’t say anything, but with andrew he doesn’t have to

so one day andrew is missing from practice and when neil comes home the tortoiseshell is curled up with sir in the beanbag, a collar around its neck

(the other foxes are wary of king at first because king looks perpetually angry, but they warm up eventually once they realize how much of a sweetheart the cat is)

(it’s not actually clear what sex king is? neil thinks andrew probably knows from when he took king to the vet, but he doesn’t care enough to ask)

anyway now that they have two cats they need to give them separate names

andrew tells neil to handle it, and neil goes to nicky

after nicky and the foxes vote, they decide on king fluffkins for the maine coon and sir fat cat mccatterson for the tortoiseshell (a little rude for a stray cat, who can’t help how skinny it is, but mostly meant to be funny)

neil returns to tell andrew the verdict, and although they are resigned to the names they decide to switch the cats so that the short-haired tortoiseshell is called King Fluffkins and the (normal-sized?) maine coon is called Sir Fat Cat McCatterson

(because nicky never actually specified which cat would get which name, he just assumed neil and andrew would figure it out, and childish spite thy name is andrew)

(the foxes like it better this way anyway, so everybody wins)

 other points of interest:

both cats were immediately and thoroughly taught how to respect boundaries

(this is andrew and neil, of course they were)

(it helps that neither of them are touchy-feely cats to begin with, thanks to their years of abuse/street life)

(it also means that now neil can tell persistent reporters that “my cats understand a ‘no’ better than you do”)

(not that the cats don’t still get in the way - they’re cats, so of course they try to sit on neil’s computer while he’s working or sleep on andrew’s stomach. but they also know when neil or andrew is having a bad day and should be left alone)

(and they know when neil or andrew is having a bad day and should be offered presents of a favourite toy or somebody’s stolen shoes)

the cats live with andrew for the two years that andrew and neil are apart

(because neil will have robin but he wants to make sure andrew’s not alone because it’s “easier”)

they cause some trouble for andrew and neil when they try to meet up though because andrew refuses to befriend anyone on his team enough to ask them to catsit

both cats absolutely hate anything to do with exy, and will not go near an exy racquet or exy ball

neil (and kevin, when he hears about it) is offended, but the rest of the foxes find it hilarious

they post videos on the team instagram of one or both cats freaking out when someone offscreen rolls an exy ball towards them

(it’s like the cucumber thing, but with exy)

several times sir has fallen off a table scrambling to get away from an exy racquet

(also since sir can’t see the ball, they have to roll it right into him. he usually jumps at the sound first, but sometimes someone will roll the ball right into his paws and he’ll trip over it. the foxes try to be gentle but it doesn’t always work. eventually neil puts a stop to it, saying his cats have suffered enough already)

one time though neil tries this with a baseball bat for some hope of redeeming his cats

but they have absolutely no problems with it and king even curls up right next to it and falls asleep

(this is probably the moment that neil decides andrew can keep the cats after graduation)

 all in all the cats are probably the best decision neil and andrew have ever made

even if they are a nuisance sometimes

when neil’s thirty-five with a long and successful exy career and vague ideas of retirement, some of his best memories are afternoons where he and andrew curled up on opposite sides of the couch, andrew with a book and neil with exy stats on his phone, the cats sleeping on the cushion between them

warm sunlight streaming in through a bay window

the smell of sickly sweet hot chocolate and gingersnaps from andrew’s afternoon snack

the strain in his legs from a grueling practice the day before

sometimes he looks at the cats and andrew and thinks pipedream or this can’t be real

but it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, because it’s his, they’re his, all of it is his