Not until he met Creamsicle anyway. He still couldn’t figure out how his cousin Balthazar had tricked him into holding the flea ridden, dirty mess of a kitten they found huddled with his two sibling under his aunt’s deck, but from the moment Gabriel touched him, that cat had wrapped him around his little finger.
Maybe Gabriel had sensed that Creamsicle as he would come to be named, shared a kindred spirit. He was never a cat that Gabriel would keep in the house, even as a kitten. He’d claw, and make a ruckus until Gabriel opened the door. He didn’t mind, it saved him from having a stinky litter box to clean.
The first time Creamsicle went missing, Gabriel panicked. He put up posters, and called all the local shelters, the whole nine yards, but a week later, Creamsicle strode back into Gabriel’s house like he’d never left.
Gabriel got used to it.
~~~~~~~
Sam had never been a cat person.
He’d wanted a dog for as long as he could remember but between his brother’s allergies and their small apartment, and then his own, he could never had one. He was adamant that he didn’t like cats, until a bedraggled orange mess of a cat had plopped itself down in his lap and started purring.
Sam liked to say that Toffee, as he would later be called, was a dog in a cat’s body. He slept on Sam’s pillow, and in his laundry basket, covering all his flannels in orange cat hair. He came and went as he pleased, often disappearing for days at a time, but he never failed to return.The first time, he’d been gone for two weeks, and Sam thought that was it, that the cat had exited his life in much the same way he had entered it, but he was wrong.
He came home from work one day to find Toffee curled up on his bed, purring loudly in his sleep.
Sam couldn’t help but smile.
~~~~~~
When three weeks had passed without hide nor hair of Creamsicle, Gabriel began to get worried. Two weeks was the longest he’d ever been away, and Gabriel was starting to fear the worst. He hadn’t seen any cats of the side of the road, and he kept a tab on the missing pets social media posts in his network, nothing. He finally decided to take a trip down to the local shelter to see if anyone had picked Creamsicle up thinking he was a stray. Gabriel wouldn’t blame them, Creamsicle had a way of looking like a pitiful creature, especially when he wanted food.
His friend Charlie often volunteered at the shelter, and she was sitting at the desk when Gabrel arrived fifteen minutes later.
“Hey Charlie!” he greeted her, leaning his elbows on the desk. “Can you let me back into the cat room?”
Charlie raised an eyebrow at him. “I didn’t know you were in the market for another cat, Creamsicle seemed like enough for you.”
Gabriel laughed. “He is, but the little monster has pulled a disappearing act, and I was wondering if he was here.”
“You’re the second person whose come in here looking for their cat today, Sam’s still in there,” she told him, leading him back. “But feel free to take a look.”
Gabriel followed Charlie back to the room where they kept all the rescue cats. After he’d gotten Creamsicle, he’d spent a couple hours back here, happy to offer a helping hand to his beloved pet’s more unfortunate brethren.
Inside, there was the tallest man that Gabriel had ever seen, with long dark hair, wearing a green flannel shirt. He was handsome, with green eyes and if Gabriel had been anywhere else, Gabriel would definitely try to flirt with him, but not right now. He was looking in the cages with interest.
“Looking for someone?” Gabriel asked, offering a smile.
The man looked at him. “Yeah, actually, My cat Toffee, he’s been missing for a bit, and I got worried,”
Gabriel nodded. “My cat too,” he told the man, looking into the cages. “Creamsicle is a bit of a wanderer, but he always comes home,”
They both busied themselves looking, Gabriel starting on one end and the man starting on the other. One by one, they looked until they came to the middle, and Gabriel breathed a sigh of relief.
Creamsicle was sitting in the middle cage, looking at Gabriel with a smug cat smirk from through the metal bars.
“There you are,” Gabriel said. “Creamsicle”
“Toffee.”
Gabriel started up at the man as he got closer. “What?”
“That’s my cat, Toffee,” the man said again, giving Gabriel a confused look.
Gabriel shook his head. “No, you got that wrong, buddy. That’s my cat, Creamsicle.”
“I think I would know my own cat,” the man sniffed, his face settling into the most epic bitch face Sam had ever seen.
“Watch this,”Gabriel said. He turned to the cat. “Creamsicle knows his name, right buddy?” He put on his best baby voice. “Creamsicle!”
The cat meowed, and Gabriel smiled.
“Toffee!”
The cat meowed again.
Gabriel frowned. The cat sitting the the cage before him was his cat, he was sure of it. “When did you get Toffee?”
“He just wandered into my apartment,” the man told him. “He sat on my lap and started purring, he looked starving.”
“I’ve had Creamsicle since he was a kitten,” Gabriel protested. “He has freckles on the inside of his lip.” Gabriel opened the cage and took Creamsicle into his arms. Giving the cat a quick chin scratch, he opened his mouth, showing the man the little black dots on the cat’s inner lip. “See?”
“Toffee has those too,” the man replied.
Suddenly Gabriel had a realization. “Say, where do you live?”
“Shoemaker Road, why?”
Gabriel began to laugh, petting the cat’s head fondly. “I think we’ve both been had,”
The man looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I live on Shoemaker too, in the house next to the apartment building,” Gabriel explained as the cat began to purr in his arms. “I think Creamsicle and Toffee are the same cat. The little monster has been conning us,”
The man began to join in on Gabriel’s laughter, and he reached over to pet Creamsicle-Toffee. “You little bastard,” he told the cat, who had the balls to look happy about all of this. “I’m Sam by the way,” he held out his hand and Gabriel took it.
“Gabriel,” he told him, a rush of courage overtaking him. “So I think we should probably talk over a custody agreement, say over dinner?”
Sam opened his mouth and then closed it again, his lips curling into a grin. “I’d like that.”
They didn’t know Charlie was behind them until she told the story at their wedding two years later.
Creamsicle-Toffee Winchester-Novak, served as their ring bearer.
From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal, deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit:
– don’t knee jerk delete. I know it’s tempting to peace out immediately but hang on and do the other steps first. Out right ghosting and erasing everything is how fandoms die.
– archive everything on your blog you want to keep
– tell your followers how they can archive and keep your work too. A lot of fic and art were only saved from ff.net and lj because other people saved it first. If you’re cool with other people saving your work for them to personally keep, let them know this. You can absolutely discourage reposting but I really do highly recommend you allow people to personally save fic and art they like and are worried will disappear forever. Digital Dark Ages are a real thing.
– tell people where you’re jumping ship to. Give links. Keep that info up, even if you’ve left the site.
– go through who you follow and find out where else you can follow them. Save their work if they’ll allow it. It’s tedious as hell but if you want to keep up with people on here clicking on their page to check in is the best way to do it.
– support places like ao3. This is exactly why ao3 asks for donations a few times a year. They are a 100% anti-purging, judgement free, ad free non profit run by an elected board and protected by lawyers. Places like ao3 literally save fandom so please continue to support them and other similar archives. This is exactly why ao3 is so important.
Also, go read the source policies and official Tumblr statements in addition to user analyses and reactions. It’s important to keep abreast of developments over time; staying informed is your power in this situation. Memes and reaction posts are funny and are a useful way to vent / provide commentary, but some of them create an inaccurate picture of what’s happening and should not be taken as evidence on their own of what developments have happened.
Okay, folks. So. Tumblr’s jumped the shark in a big way, and I’m not even just talking about indiscriminately blocking all “adult” content on a platform that IS, in fact, primarily 18+.
Many blogs, like the wonderful @blackkatmagic , that are not especially NSFW have vanished.
(And I for one LIKE being able to go to curated porn blogs run by actual people and have a chance of finding stuff to my taste, it was one of the things that kept me on this hellsite, but that’s another issue entirely.)
I know lots of people are talking about migrating, but none of us are sure to where yet. Pillowfort seems to be an option, some people are talking about Twitter. But for now, it’s a mess, and even if we knew where we were going, it’s often a huge process, and a lot of us have stuff on tumblr that ONLY exists there.
One possible quick solution to save your blogs, both NSFW and personal, is to import it to WordPress. I found this solution through from frantic googling on how to save an entire blog, text posts an all. There are several apps for downloading all the pictures from a tumblr, (Plently for Windows, but only a few paid ones for mac, of which Tumbelog Picture Downloader is working for me so far) but this is the only solution I’ve seen so far that allows you to save EVERYTHING. I downloaded my NSFW blog in like 10 min. My regular blog, which is significantly larger, is in the process of importing, but I don’t anticipate any problems. I will, of course, update you if I have any.
This tutorial I found worked really easily. http://quickguide (.) tumblr (.) com/post/39780378703/backing-up-your-tumblr-blog-to-wordpress
I put parenthesis around the .’s like we’re back in FF-Hell, just in case tumblr’s new thing about outgoing links kicks in. You know what to do.
To break it down, just in case:
Sign up for a WordPress.com account at wordpress (.) com/start
You’ll have to create an account, with your email, a username, and a password. They should send you a confirmation email immediately, check it, activate it, and you’re good to go.
On the site, it will ask you for a site name. That page asks you a bunch of other information too, but you only have to fill out the site name.
Then you have to give your site a URL. If you’re lucky, your tumblr URL is still available, if not you’ll have to come up with another one, sorry.
It will tell you if that option is still available for free.
Then it will ask you to pick a plan. Free is really good enough, I swear.
Now you’re set up! You can import your tumblr!
The only differences from the linked tutorial are that the Import button is now on the first level menu, not in tools.
Hit Import, then you have to follow the link for “other importers” at the bottom, to find the option for Tumblr.
Then you’ll have to sign in with tumblr, using your normal tumblr credentials. You’ll be redirected there automatically.
You’ll have to allow WordPress permissions on your blog.
Then your blogs, including all your sideblogs, will show up in wordpress.
Hit import, wait a WHILE depending on the size of your blog, and you’re done!
ALSO!!
I made my NSFW blog private for now, since I don’t know WP’s policy on NSFW.
This means that to access it, someone has to have an account and request access. But hey, part of our problem on this hellsite has been people going places they aren’t wanted, so I don’t personally see this as a bad thing. They can send a request from the landing site on your blog, you get an email, click a link in the email, and PRESTO, they have access.
To make it private, go to Settings > Reading > Site Visibility. Go back and check, it took me changing the setting twice for it to actually stick.
tl;dr, you can import your entire blog to wordpress in just a few steps.
I’m going to tag the hell out of this, in no particular order. PLEASE reblog this and spread the word so people know it’s an option. If you’re having trouble, PM me, and I’m happy to help.
I Aim To Misbehave 