misc – Pain In The Bud

The Big Cats Of ‘Exodus’ Are Badass

The new science fiction franchise consists of novels, a short film, a game due out next year, and an encyclopedic art book. It’s got a compelling narrative, deep lore and all the trappings of great SF, and best of all it has awesome big cats.

Exodus is a hugely anticipated upcoming game from the team behind the beloved Mass Effect series, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s also a 900-plus page science fiction novel, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by the outstanding novelist Peter F. Hamilton. A second book, Exodus: The Helium Sea, also authored by Hamilton, is due for release on June 16. A short film in the Amazon Prime Video series Secret Level, titled Exodus: Odyssey, further expands the fictional universe and its lore, as does an “encyclopedia” hardcover about the Exodus universe, its major factions, planets and technology.

Matthew McConaughy is enthusiastically involved, as an actor and producer. (Allright, allright, allright!)

Oh, and it has big cats!

The screenshots in this post are from Exodus: Odyssey, and depict an Awakened Jaguar.

In Exodus, certain animals are “Awakened,” meaning they’ve been genetically modified to give them cognitive and physical gifts.

In the case of big cats, it means they’re smart enough to understand human language, follow complex instructions, interact with technology, and make decisions. Big cats are companions, guards and serve as intimidating special units in the military.

The Awakened Jaguar in this scene is the companion and guardian of a planetary governor. He’s very protective of his human and immediately leaps up to growl in warning when a visitor takes an aggressive step forward.

The Awakened Jaguar leaps up as a conversation becomes intense.

Awakened animals can wear tech peripherals, weapons, armor and tools. Big cats are mostly muscle, guards, soldiers and are used to intimidate enemies, while planetary police forces use Awakened dogs and one prominent character is an Awakened octopus who occupies a tank in his own personal mech, allowing him freedom of movement outside of water.

In Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, there’s a scene depicting Awakened Lions deployed with the military. They’re considerably larger than terrestrial elephants, weighing several tons, standing three times the height of adult men. They’re terrifying to behold, which is precisely why the Celestial military has them accompany their generals as honor guards.

There are also Awakened Tigers who are bigger and much more intelligent than their Earthly counterparts, with fur that can function as active camouflage. The Awakened Tigers are described and illustrated in a companion book, which notes that while the genetically modified big cats are powerful, intimidating and extremely effective, they also have voracious appetites, scarfing down more than a hundred pounds of meat per day.

The Exodus encyclopedia shows an Awakened Tiger standing protectively over a recon soldier:

A two-page illustration of an Awakened Tiger from the Exodus Encyclopedia.

As for the story behind Exodus, I cannot say enough good things about Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.

Hamilton is known for sprawling far-future narratives that combine memorable characters with fabulous technology, vividly imagined societies and awe-inspiring discoveries in the cosmos.

Many of his novels deal with humanity’s encounters with alien civilizations, which range from the serenely benevolent (the Raiel) to the terrifyingly genocidal (MorningLightMountain) and everything in between.

Exodus departs from that template to tell a story about a conflict between regular humans and the Celestials, post-humans who have spent tens of thousands of years on a self-guided evolutionary path that has transformed them into creatures that no longer bear any resemblance to the rest of humanity.

A Celestial queen from the Crown Dominion. The Crown Dominion’s Celestials appear bizarre to us but are actually among the more “normal” looking of the Celestial factions. The most inhuman are said to be the dread Mara Yama and the Talloch-Te.

To say the Celestials consider themselves better than “baseline” humanity is a drastic understatement — Celestial societies have no qualms about breeding humans for specialized labor and roles, emphasizing traits like subservience and loyalty.

In other words, regular humans are treated the same way many in our current society treat animals, as commodities and resources to exploit.

Naturally that does not sit well with people, and the central narrative follows a rebellious group who seek to free every faction from Celestial shackles.

I’m looking forward eagerly to Exodus: The Helium Sea, the second epic novel set for release in six short weeks. I was a bit anxious that a series of novels as a tie-in to a game would be somehow not as great as Hamilton’s usual books, but I should have known the author doesn’t do anything half-assed. The first book introduced compelling mysteries and answered a lot of burning questions, but left plenty to look forward to and resolve.

And as much as I’m hyped for the story, I’m also crossing my fingers for more big cats. Maybe I can convince the creative team that their universe needs an Awakened Buddy…

“No, dude, I get the captain’s quarters! I will generously allow you to use my bed and you will continue to have the honor of being my pillow and stuff.”

Wordless Wednesday: Movie Stars

Little Buddy is the brains and the badass. Big Buddy is the sidekick. Script by Little Buddy.

Wait, I’m the sidekick? Why am I the sidekick?

This Animal Was Going To Be Someone’s Lunch. Now It’s A Beloved Star

Can an ocean-dwelling invertebrate make music? Mattias Krantz thought so. Proving his point took months of work, creative thinking and perseverance.

Mattias Krantz got Tako from a Japanese seafood market.

“That guy,” he told the person manning the stall, pointing to a common octopus sitting in shallow water with others of its kind, not even given room to swim before it was to become someone’s meal.

It is the ultimate as far as random interventions of fate go, and I kept thinking about Tako’s almost-end on a plate while watching musician Mattias Krantz teach the clever animal how to play piano.

Octopus are smart. Comparing animal intelligence to human intelligence is always a flawed and imprecise effort, not least because of differences in psychology and evolution, but the eight-armed invertebrates have cognitive abilities on par with humans at three years old. That is to say, some of their cognitive gifts exceed those of small children, some fall short, and some are about equal. It’s always going to be apples to oranges between species.

Octopus learn quickly simply by observing. They remember individual people even if they haven’t seen them for months. They play, explore and even decorate their dens. In the wild, species like the mimic octopus perform nature’s most astonishing acts of imitation, not only changing the hue, texture and patterns of their skin, but also their shape and the way they move. They can imitate dozens of creatures, blend into the sand, and disguise themselves as plants and rocks. When a predator approaches, the mimic octopus takes on the shape, color and behavior of another predator — a highly venomous fish, for example — and scares off the aggressor. That requires serious smarts.

Technically, saying Tako is playing piano may be a stretch. Octopus can’t hear, so Krantz rigged Tako’s tank with a device that turns sound to rhythmic pulses in the water.

Yet there is no denying that Taku took to the piano with enthusiasm, happily played it, even looked forward to it every day when Krantz’ multiple iterations of waterproof keyboards finally reached a point where the animal could reliably manipulate the keys. (Krantz had to create switches Tako could pull, for example, as it’s difficult for the invertebrates to push keys.)

Krantz’ determination is admirable. The Swedish musician, known for his quirky projects, overcame major hurdles that would have stopped most people, and navigating some of those challenges required radical reconsideration of how humans and animals interact with the world.

Yet Krantz and Tako got there in the end, and the piano is only one part of it. Tako is short for takoyaki, a Japanese fried octopus dish. Watching Tako’s interest and enthusiasm as he tackled the piano day after day, you can’t help but think about his less fortunate tankmates, and our collective ambivalence to the overwhelming evidence that we share this planet with billions of other minds, each with their own thoughts and feelings.

Header image of common octopus credit Albert Kok/Wikimedia Commons

Calling All Holy Cats And Their Human Servants!

Help us figure out the mysterious feline behavior known as “begging paws”/”praying” gesture.

Back in 2024 we published a story about cats doing the begging paws/praying gesture.

For the uninitiated, it’s a quirky behavior in which a cat sits upright on its back feet, then places the front paws together and moves them up and down as if fervently at prayer — or begging for something. (Though that’s undoubtedly our anthropomorphic interpretation of a distinctly feline quirk.)

Our post about the begging paws has become one of the most popular stories on this site, with people regularly finding us via search engines as they try to learn more about this strange behavior.

The last time we asked around, several veterinarians and behaviorists were happy to speak to us about the subject, but no one could say for sure what the begging paws motion means.

We’re going to give it another shot and hopefully get some answers by comparing notes with people whose cats engage in the behavior. If your cat does the begging paws/praying gesture, we’d love to hear from you!

Please comment here or email paininthebud at gmail along with:

The name, age and gender of your cat
How frequently your cat does the gesture
Anything patterns or related behavior you’ve noticed: does your cat “pray” at certain times or in response to something she sees? Do you reward the behavior with treats, affection or attention? Has your cat always done it, or did the behavior emerge at a particular time?

Any detail could help uncover what exactly our furry friends are doing.

If you have photos or video of your cat “praying,” we’d love to include those clips in our follow-up story as well.

Hopefully by working together we can understand this quirky behavior and finally solve the mystery of why our cats do it!

Of Cats And Books

A look at the strange and wonderful world of rare books where, of course, you’ll also find cats.

I’ve always liked the idea of antiquarian bookshops.

I am almost completely ignorant on the subject, mostly because chasing after extremely rare print volumes is the domain of people with a lot of expendable income. The most valuable books in my possession are an original 1939 first edition print of Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, and two novels signed by their authors. Their value is sentimental, not monetary.

But I like the general romanticized image of the antiquarian bookseller: an older man or woman in tweed ensconced in a cozy shop in Manhattan, with every shelf filled with dusty volumes and every surface covered by globes, astrolabes and other curiosities. There’s one of those tight winding staircases with wrought iron railings leading to a loft for access to the highest shelves, the music is from a vinyl collection of light jazz, and it’s always raining outside.

A doted-on shop cat dozes on a red leather armchair, tail twitching from some nightmare in which it’s slightly less adorable than it thinks it is.

Collectors in damp trenchcoats drop in, asking after 17th-century occult tomes, grimoires, and Voynich-esque manuscripts with engravings of impossible creatures, trees with visual organs and arcane rituals. Bibliophiles ask after leatherbound collections of classics like Don Quixote, and the occasionally curious passerby peeks in, surprised that such shops still exist in the age of the internet.

It turns out that’s not too far from the truth, especially the bits about the internet and, of course, the cats.

Johnny Depp is constantly smoking and drinking red wine while handling priceless old books in 1999’s The Ninth Gate. Notice the winding staircase in the rare book shop in the top screenshot.

The Booksellers is a documentary that screened in festivals in late 2019 before heading straight to video when the pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt.

It’s an inside look at the annual New York Book Fair and the small world of antiquarian and rare booksellers in New York, a shrinking constellation of people mostly descended from, or formerly apprenticed to, the booksellers of old before Barnes and Noble and Jeff Bezos laid waste to that sector of retail.

Before network TV, cable TV, dial-up internet, broadband, Kindles, iPads and smartphones turned us into a media-gorging — yet paradoxically less literate — society, New York was home to more than 500 bookshops, including generalists and specialists who catered to people with particular and peculiar interests. Now it’s home to fewer than 80, according to the documentary.

When the booksellers were asked about the way the internet has impacted their trade, their weary sighs reminded me of my older colleagues from my brief time experiencing the end of the “good old days” of newspapering, before the internet destroyed or compromised every publishing income stream and delivered us to this moment. This dystopian time when entire swaths of the country have become news deserts, Elon Musk in all his wisdom asserts that Twitter accounts run by anonymous trolls in Belarus are just as reliable — even more trustworthy, in fact — than those liars in legacy media, and corporate raiders are stripping the last handful of newspapers down to assets they can auction off.

A rare book shop in Paris. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Not all of it’s bad. One rare book dealer laments the fact that “the thrill of the hunt” is gone, meaning it no longer takes years to track down some obscure volume because you can hop online and find it in a few clicks. I get that, but nostalgia for that sort of thing is the ultimate in looking back through rose-colored glasses. Plenty of us could wax nostalgic about the days when we’d hear a song on the radio and have to hum the damn thing to record store clerks, but we’re forgetting about the considerable frustration involved. Given the choice between “fun” ignorance and access to information, I’ll always choose the latter.

As for the cats, it’s not a surprise when many of the book dealers interviewed for the film identify themselves as cat lovers or idly scratch their feline friends while showing off their vast personal collections. Antiquarian bookshops tend to be warm, quiet, gently-lit spaces, perfect napping spots for cats who guard old books from rodents.

If you’re interested in watching The Booksellers, you can find it on Amazon Prime video, or better yet, just click below: