We had to bid farewell to my cat Oreo early on Wednesday morning. If you've been on the Lab for a really long time, he was the piebald kitty reading the D&D book while lounging in a mildly obscene posture in my profile picture before I switched to my current avatar. 

 

 

He was a grouchy, ornery old man who frequently hissed at and got in fights with our other cats. He was also an inveterate cuddle-bug with a shockingly loud purr who quickly adopted my wife and became her best buddy. While it's never easy to lose a pet, Oreo was able to enjoy 19 years of life and appeared to be largely free of discomfort until his final 3 weeks - and even then we were able to keep him comfortable until his health drastically declined on Tuesday night. The vet confirmed that short of hospitalization, there was nothing we could do for him as his kidney disease had reached a terminal stage. He passed peacefully, purring the whole time as he want to sleep while my wife and I petted him. 

 

 

Oreo is survived by Nala, his long time roommate and nemesis, and by our two kittens (not kittens anymore!), Scoobie and Pixy. Pixy in particular had managed to befriend Oreo in spite of all his grouchiness, and the poor orange doofus is right now searching the whole house trying to find his friend. It's sad and hard to watch, but I'm glad that Oreo was able to forge a good relationship with the other kitties before his time came.

 

 

Even though we knew he didn't have much time left after his health scare a couple weeks ago, his passing still hit my family pretty hard, and I don't expect to be doing a lot of blogging for the new few days. Still, thinking about him did give me one idea that I figured I'd share while I did it. I downloaded A Cat's Life 2, and took a look at it to see if it would be a good fit for my build I'm putting together.

 

The mod was clean and free of errors, at with only about 3000 records it will be a candidate for ESL flagging once the tools for using the new extended ESL space become well tested and mature. There were a few conflicts, but most of it was just top-level cell data or positioning adjustments for ACHRs.

 

 

That one landscape record was mostly an ITM that was reverting Update.esm, but something must have changed because ITM cleaning didn't catch it.

 

 

Weirdly, row 19 forwards the Update.esm edit to the vertex normals.

 

 

Further down we get some genuine changes.

 

 

We'll tentatively patch this by starting with the revised Update.esm landscape and only forwarding unique changes from ACL. We'll need to check this in-game for irregularities but I suspect it will be OK.

 

 

As I'm doing this, I just noticed that this appears to be for a cell that adds a building to the exterior, so I might have to throw out this particular patch and go with the ACL record in its entirety if it's necessary to prevent terrain intrusion on the store, but let's patch the rest of the conflicts, then check it out and see.

 

The mod contained a few object references that were set to "initially disabled" but not otherwise treated to guard against them accidentally getting enabled. I added the player as an inverse enable parent for them so that if something else tried to modify the object ref it wouldn't accidentally cause them to reappear.

 

 

The navmesh reverted changes from the USSEP, which is naughty, but it also introduced a change to the edge links which I had to take into account. I patched the edge link change onto the USSEP since otherwise the two mods weren't mutually incompatible, editing different aspects of the mesh.

 

 

 

Edge link cleaning still doesn't work as of 4.1.5b, so I may be reverting back to xEdit 4.0.4 soon if a fix isn't forthcoming. For now I forwarded the edge links from ACL, but this of course is an imperfect approach and I might need to go in and do a more thorough cleaning lately. It'll get the job done for now, however.

 

There's also one more edit I want to make before I go into the game to test. While the tuxedo cat in ACL isn't a perfect match for Oreo's pattern, its still close enough for my purposes. That said, if someone with better GIMP skills than mine wants to make a custom texture for me, I can provide reference photos that give a better view of his coat pattern. 

 

 

Funny story, Oreo earned his nickname not because of his aroma but because of his attitude towards the other cats in the house. Nevertheless, he decided to break up the sad mood during our final visitation with him at the emergency vet by letting out a truly profound and rank fart while we were petting him. It broke up the tension a bit and helped us regain a little composure before the vet returned to give him his final treatment.

 

 

A quick walk around the exterior pet store location didn't reveal any obvious terrain seams, but the front path was a little overgrown. I hopped in to the CK and quickly "mowed the grass" on that path to make it more accessible. I had to make a few edits to the adjoining cell's landscape as well, just to avoid a texture seam along the zone line. 

 

 

Still a little overgrown, but now there's a clear path from the main road to the shop. 

 

I don't cleave to the supernatural claims of organized religion, but I'm heartened in the knowledge that spacetime is a unitary system, not separate space and time. For the 15 years he was in my life and the 8 years he was in my wife's, Oreo is still present with us. In a sense, we'll never truly be separated, even if at the place in time we're experiencing now he's gone. And beyond that, he'll live on for decades to come in our memories and in the photographic record we created to capture our companions' lives and likenesses.

 

 

The modes we as a society use to dispose of remains cause me ethical concerns. While most of the cells that make up our bodies are surely doomed as central control fails and the system falls into entropy, it gives me great pause to further take away whatever miniscule chance of ongoing life those cells posses by embalming, cremation, or decay inside a sealed vessel like a coffin. This is an order of magnitude more true for the countless and teeming life-forms that share the surface and interior of our bodies with us. In that sense, even burial is less than idea, since many of those organisms that might have a small chance of survival in nature are unlikely to persevere when placed under six feet of earth. I wish we lived in a society that had the consciousness of our nature as complex collective organisms and the humility to accept the natural process of decay and where remains could be allowed to repose in woods and other natural spaces where opportunities for escape into the wild or even to find a new home in the bodies of scavengers could grant if not our own cells at least the populations of our resident organisms a chance at ongoing life.

 

But with the ground still frozen, burial wasn't an option for Oreo, and reluctantly we had to accept cremation for him. We'll give his ashes a place of honor in our home, and we collected clippings of his fur immediately after his passing, so his body won't be completely gone, though sadly the storage needs of those clippings will prevent any mites or other parts of Oreo's microbiome from having a meaningful chance of relocating elsewhere. I wish we could leave them out of the other cats to sniff at and maybe rehome those blameless little arthopods, but we have to be selfish in that regard and keep them sealed away so the clippings aren't scattered and lost.

 

And so, in the material world, the small measure of real immortality Oreo might have enjoyed through the propagation of the survivors of what to them must be a world-shattering disaster is denied to us. But we still have our memories, and at least through my hobby, I can give him a small level of virtual continuance. 

 

 

And in this imaginary world, where I have the ability to shape the form of future events, I can ensure that he won't have to part from us prematurely. 

 

 

Having four cats was such a privilege. Such a challenge, too, but that was a cost well worth their companionship and affection. It won't be the same without Mister Stinky.

 

 

I'm not sure if you came here today for modding advice or for the NSFW hijinks that are Loverslab's bread and butter, but I'm pretty sure this volume of the blog wasn't quick what you were expecting. Thank you for sticking with it to the end and helping me process some of my own grief. As I mentioned a bit earlier, I'll probably have some downtime before I feel up for diving back into this project, but I'll try not to be too long. 

 

See you all soon, folks.