writing – Pain In The Bud

The Strange Experience Of Others Insisting Your Writing Is AI

Those of us with even a modicum of writing talent are suddenly bumping up against hostile readers who insist we’re purveyors of AI slop. The people we have to thank for this new experience? The purveyors of AI slop.

Fresh off reading a fiction novel and highly amused by the author’s tendency to go on bizarre tangents, I wrote a few hundred satirical words mimicking his style and shared it to a subreddit.

I expected like-minded people to respond. Hopefully they’d find it amusing. At the very least, it should spark a conversation.

Instead I checked back the next day to find my post hidden by downvotes.

The top comment: “AI slop, f— off loser.”

The second-highest rated comment was simply “ChatGPT.”

I should have cut my losses and moved on, but it bothered me that something I wrote could be so easily and thoughtlessly dismissed as the product of AI. So I responded explaining that I had in fact written the post, slapping it together during some downtime because I thought fellow readers might get a kick out of it.

I have many deficiencies as a writer which frustrate me to no end, but I do have a modest talent for literary mimicry that I’ve deployed at various times to make observations about novelists like George R.R. Martin, popular essayists like Mitch Albom, and people like Donald Trump, whose speech patterns are practically emblazoned in neon.

No, the commenters told me. You didn’t write that post, you used ChatGPT, you are a loser, and you need to f— right off with your AI slop.

Apparently it is now inconceivable that human beings with even moderate talent exist, that anyone would spend 15 minutes jotting down a satirical take on a popular book or TV show, or put any effort into anything at all when we can cognitively offload everything.

It just happened to me again twice in recent weeks, bringing the total to probably half a dozen times since January. It doesn’t happen here because readers know me, and the blog has been around for seven years. If I’ve been using a large language model to write this blog, then I must have a time machine that allowed me to access the tech at least two years before its first crude incarnations were tested in-house at OpenAI.

Plus there’s no other idiot out there who writes absurd stories glorifying his pet cat for fictional adventures like running a criminal catnip empire. It’s not as if there’s a line of people trying to emulate what we do here, nor is there profit in it. It’s a labor of love not just because I love cats, but also because I love my cat. He’s changed my life for the better and I enjoy writing about his antics.

There is also a strong argument for not caring. Social media and general forums are not lacking for miserable cynics and people who work through their real life frustrations by vomiting bile in every direction.

I don’t need to justify myself to every cynic and malcontent, nor do I want to take on the burden of proving a negative.

The real-life impact of AI on the news and publishing industries

Unfortunately it’s becoming more difficult to ignore because it’s beginning to impact more than just online dialog.

Generative AI has put the editors of genre magazines and periodicals on their back feet. Editors, already overworked, find themselves trying to navigate “a swamp of slop.” Some have shut down general submissions entirely. Others have adopted convoluted processes or require known writers to vouch for the submitter, as if they’re applying for membership in an exclusive social club.

Generative AI is also destroying what’s left of the news industry, and the damage is now so widespread that it isn’t only impacting people who used to crank out simple daily stories. When entire publications fold and companies like Gannett turn formerly excellent broadsheets into little more than AI-generated shells for advertising inserts, investigative journalism jobs disappear and government employees at the municipal, county and state level operate without anyone keeping watch.

I think about some of the stories I wrote: A series about an unusually high number of suicides on particular bridges in New York that led to major changes in safety features on those bridges. A comprehensive account of extensive fraud in the state jail system. An investigation into New York-based charities guilty of outright corruption or abysmal program spending, run by people who paid themselves well and held glitzy charity galas, but actually raised very little or nothing for the causes they claimed to represent. An interview with the traumatized dad of a mass shooter who kept blaming himself and asking “Where did I go wrong as a father?”

And the story I’m most proud of, an 11th-hour rush job about an abducted girl, an article I scrambled to get done by the print deadline and submitted just minutes before pagination files were sent to pre-press. The story ran in one of our sister papers in New Jersey, leading to a reader recognizing the kidnapper the same day it was published. The reader called police, who found the man with the young girl he’d abducted.

I helped save a kid from a horrific, life-altering trauma! I don’t say that to toot my own horn, but to emphasize the value of real journalism, of human beings prioritizing a story and making every effort to get it done and published when there are real stakes. The story wasn’t anything special, it didn’t stretch my abilities or win any awards, but it impacted the lives of a real family for the better.

A machine could not have taken a call from a panicked mother, reassured her every effort would be made to get the story out, driven to the detective bureau after hours to verify the details, found out where the abductor had roots, and made sure the story ran in the newspaper covering the area where the abductor likely fled with his victim.

That kind of journalism cannot be replaced by AI or bloggers. It takes training, strong news judgment, the ability to navigate bureaucratic circles of hell, and lots of patience in dealing with people who consider reporters irredeemable bottom-feeders.

At least as it stands now, generative AI can’t replace a thoughtful interviewer, a true investigative reporter, or honest analysis of important stories. An investigative reporter can use AI to help scour thousands of documents for a needle in a haystack or to search for hidden patterns, but that is an example of incorporating the tech into a workflow, using it to make drudge work easier, not using it to replace a human. Human consciousness and judgment is still the guiding force behind the effort.

Still, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that this is happening as often as it has been recently. We may be living in an age of algorithmic AI, of simulated intelligence instead of AGI and true machine cognition, but this is not what I envisioned while imagining the ways AI could impact society.

It’s also frustrating that my writing is now automatically dismissed as “slop” because it doesn’t have some arbitrary lack of polish to it, or because people are cynical in general.

My writing is the closest thing to my consciousness, to my mind, to me.

Obviously I format and attempt to copy edit my own posts. A replica of my stream of consciousness wouldn’t make for coherent, entertaining reading. But when I write a post about an issue impacting animals, my feelings for my best Bud, or something else that I’ve got an opinion on, you’re reading my thoughts on the subject.

That is a direct result of who I am. To offload that to a machine seems insane, an abdication of my mind, personality and voice to a fancy bit of code.

AI-generated content is even more ubiquitous than we realize

When I finish my novel — a narrative that weaves elements of space opera with themes about species conservation and appreciation for our one and only home planet — will I run into skeptical editors? Will some people dismiss it out of hand if they deem it too polished or they’ve been inundated with submissions from people who see AI as a shortcut to getting published? Will there still be a book publishing industry?

A Wall Street Journal story about the most recent AI publishing scandal.

The doors are already closing. In the latest scandal, a publishing company withdrew a multimillion-dollar advance to an author whose debut had sparked a bidding war because he used AI to write the novel. (The claimed author, Jerry Falade, says he did not use AI and argues he’s a victim of racism targeting black novelists, though it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t just the publishers who bought the rights in the US and UK who cancelled the book. His agent dropped him too, saying she “could no longer substantiate” Falade’s insistence that he wrote the book.)

Given the fact that they’re voluntarily shelving a novel that was likely to move copies and make them a tidy profit, it’s difficult to believe the publishers and agent made the decision lightly.

The fact that Falade is an academic does not shield him from suspicion. The writer Sam Kriss has called out several people in higher education for using AI, including Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins University. Kriss cited this passage, which screams “I wrote this with ChatGPT”:

“Not a ceremony. Not a transition. A series of viral moments. A missile arc across a pale sky, and below it, the world already changed.”

Indeed, that precise sentence construction appears in another bit of AI writing highlighted by Kriss, and you can find it in AI-generated writing all over the internet. “Not an X. Not a Y. A Z,” followed by a bit of purple prose that sounds vaguely poetic but says nothing. Why the large language model likes to phrase things that way is a mystery, but it must have appeared in annotated data sets used by OpenAI to train the algorithm, and now it’s popping up with alarming regularity in essays, news stories and fiction writing “authored” by people who have suddenly and miraculously transformed into prolific, polished writers.

Not an accident. Not a happy coincidence. A blaring klaxon forged in ones and zeroes, summoned by prompt engineers communing with the machine gods.

That’s just one example, but AI’s penchant for using certain phrases and rhythmic structures has led to an unsettling, self-reinforcing homogeneity. The more AI uses these constructions, the more we’re hammered over the head with them, the more they leak into our own conversations and writing. It’s like going on vacation with a friend and coming back two weeks later to realize you’ve picked up on their favorite exclamations. Except that friend is now everywhere at once, and half your work colleagues have incorporated his -isms into their everyday dialog.

I use AI for images, which makes me a hypocrite

This has, of course, led me to reevaluate my use of generative AI images on this blog.

I’ve justified it by telling myself there was never going to be a situation in which I’d commission a professional artist to paint images of my cat dunking over NBA players in a summer league game, looking comically ridiculous in a powdered wig as a captain aboard a 17th century ship of the line, or riding through the jungle on the back of a jaguar 10 times his size.

An AI-generated image of Buddy playing street ball at a Manhattan court. I tend to use AI for two things: to explain physics concepts I have difficulty wrapping my head around, and to generate images of my cat in ridiculous situations.

There’s also a crucial difference in that I’m using AI images to illustrate humor stories on a blog, not submitting them to galleries or publications as my own work, then accepting payment and plaudits for them, which is what many people are doing with AI-authored writing.

While that’s true, it’s also true that I’m participating in the devaluing of art on some level. More recently I’ve made a conscious effort to limit its use here, but that still makes me a hypocrite. I relied on it too heavily in the past and now routinely see blogs that use it for every post. I’m not judging those bloggers, merely observing how much we’ve all come to rely on the technology.

The improbably prolific new masters of prose

On the writing side, there’s also been a deluge of new “storytellers” who write generic stuff in a punchy style, with minimalist sentences and formatting that is unmistakably the output of a large language model. They blog under names like “Stories from the Mind Of…” or “Weekend Stories With…” and they always seem to have the right anecdote to illustrate some generic societal ill.

Many of these new, astonishingly prolific writers are publishing their AI-generated stories on platforms like WordPress, WebNovel, Royal Road and Youtube, and people are eating it up despite the fact that it’s machine-generated, generic content. It’s not coincidence that Amazon suddenly has three times as many book titles for sale, or that there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to genre stories — horror, science fiction, romance — that contain all the hallmarks and language quirks of AI, including nearly identical plots, recycled character names, and recycled phrases. Nor is it happenstance that they’ve all materialized out of nowhere in the last year or two.

A Youtube channel that posts science fiction stories narrated by AI, with images created by AI, and music created by AI, by a person who claims he does not use AI to generate his stories despite all the hallmarks of AI-generated writing.

Some publish stories of 8,000 to 10,000 words several times a week or even daily! As a writer who came up in a daily news environment, I’ve learned to pump out accurate, polished posts with regularity. It is a requirement of the job.

If you can write in a busy newsroom with phones ringing, police scanners buzzing, and more than 100 coworkers in an open office plan chatting away, you can write just about anywhere.

And yet I cannot dream of dropping polished 8,000-word fiction stories every single day. No human being can do that. Even if you can keep that pace for a short while (and very few people can), before long you’ll be derailed by burnout, a lack of new ideas, stories that just don’t come together the way you envisioned. Or maybe life just gets in the way.

The hidden physical cost of AI

A server room at CERN, the large hadron collider in Switzerland. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While I don’t want to come off as one of those people who reflexively condemns new forms of tech, the more I learn about the infrastructure behind AI, the less I like it.

AI requires massive data centers that rival or exceed cities in power consumption. While it’s true that data centers have existed for decades, the centers that power AI are a new breed, orders of magnitude more power-hungry than their predecessors.

Advanced processors require cool ambient temperatures but they also generate lots of waste heat, meaning data centers are also a huge drain on water reserves. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. With summers getting hotter, what happens when there are droughts? If you think the government will tell big tech to ease up on data center water consumption, you’re probably not aware that our government doesn’t even protect cities and states from overwhelming water consumption by foreign-owned industrial farms.

There are communities in the southwest that have become endangered because, for example, Saudi-owned alfalfa farms consume so much water that there’s none left over for the people who live there. Politicians listen to the people who have the deepest pockets and a town of 10,000 in Arizona can’t compete with the vast wealth at the disposal of Saudi Arabian interests, even when those constituents have been reduced to frantically filling gallon containers in the brief interludes when new rainfall temporarily replenishes reservoirs.

Don’t like it? Go to Costco and stock up on spring water. No, the congressman cannot take your call. He’s got a meeting on data center expansion this afternoon.

If our elected representatives side with foreign investors over their own voters, we have little chance of them siding with us over deep-pocketed technology giants, headed by tech oligarchs who cut checks to lawmakers in every election cycle and already have their tendrils deep in government at every level.

Finally, about that cognitive offloading we talked about earlier: the mind and brain depend on keeping skills sharp. If we don’t use it, we lose it. It’s very easy to see how capabilities and intelligence may regress in our society if everyone uses AI for virtually everything.

Maybe all this is pointless. Maybe I am, in the words of Kriss, merely expressing “the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape.”

I’m not condemning anyone who uses AI and I’m not saying I’ll never use AI again. That would make an even bigger hypocrite out of me, and it would be an act of self-harm not to keep up with such a rapidly-evolving technology. But I am going to make an effort to use it sparingly, hopefully only when absolutely necessary, and never to write a single word for me.

As a one-man band without a budget, for example, I rely on free-license photos from Wikimedia Commons and Pexels to provide visuals for my posts. Which is fine for the majority of topics, but sometimes there are obscure stories that cannot be illustrated with existing free photos.

For the other stuff, I’ll go back to the simple charms of bad Photoshops of Buddy as a Godzilla-size cat stomping around Manhattan in search of similarly massive turkeys.

And let’s hope services like Pangram, which claims 99 percent accuracy in detecting AI-generated writing, stay ahead in the arms race. Already people determined to use AI to become authors and storytellers are using so-called “humanizers” in an attempt to fool those apps. I suspect the next few years will look an awful lot like the unending battle between hackers and security companies in their own arms race to stay ahead of exploits.

Buddy The Cat

He’s crazy, he’s a whirling ball of energy and he frequently plots to take over the world, but he’s my feline pal.

We’d only been home for a few hours and already the kitten was demanding I let him out of the bedroom.

I’d done lots of reading before bringing my new pal home to his forever abode. I was prepared for him to remain in his carrier, dash under my bed only to emerge for food and water, or cry in confusion.

He did none of those things.

Instead the tiny kitten came striding out of his carrier, surveying his new surroundings with interest, and proceeded to conquer everything in sight like a furry little Genghis Khan.

He was loud, he never stopped “talking,” and I got the distinct impression that everything that previously belonged to me now belonged to him.

“Comfy chair! Mine!” he meowed. “Oooh, a big bed! Mine! Are these bowls mine too? Of course they are. Look, toys! Mine! Hey what’s this thing with black and white keys on it? A synthesizer, you say? Well, this ‘synthesizer’ is now mine! Look at how much fun it is to run on it!”

All the advice on the internet emphasized keeping the kitten in one room for at least a couple of days so as not to overwhelm the little one. He needed to know where the essentials like his litter box, scratcher and food bowls were located, and he needed to feel safe.

But Buddy, the name I called him while trying to think of something clever — and would officially bestow on him two weeks later — had other ideas.

There was an entire apartment beyond that closed door, and it was very important for him to survey his new kingdom and claim its contents immediately!

So I reluctantly opened the door and a little ball of whirling energy came tearing out, narrating his activities in real time in a voice that sounded like a baby Elmo as he got into everything.

I realized very early on that first night that the cautious approach I’d planned on was out the window. Any restrictions recommended by internet guides were not applicable with this kitten.

The idea that he would sleep in his bed and I’d retain my own? Laughable! I was fortunate he would allow me to continue sleeping there, and only after he was tired of tormenting me. With the lights out he ruthlessly attacked my toes, tearing me out of sleep almost as soon as I lost consciousness before retreating into the darkness to cackle gleefully and do it all over again.

The human makes funny noises when I bite his feet! the tiny kitten trilled delightedly. So fun!

Enduring his relentless assaults on my feet seemed a small price to pay when I woke up on one of those first nights and found Bud fast asleep with all four paws wrapped around my right arm, clearly comforted by my presence and proximity. It would become the first of countless times when I would endure an uncomfortable position, an arm or leg going numb, or put off the call of nature to avoid disturbing my little Buddy.

That was 12 years ago and I can’t really remember what life was like before Buddy was a part of it.

He has become my best friend, my constant companion, my foil, my partner in crime, and a reliable reminder not to take life too seriously. He’s my shadow. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to sleep without him draped over me or borrowed between my knees.

He is, unfortunately, the primary culprit in interrupted sleep, but he doesn’t wake me because he’s hungry or thirsty. I make sure he has a bowl of dry food and fresh water before bed every night in addition to his two daily wet food meals. (And all the snacks he demands through urgent meows.)

He doesn’t conduct night time commando raids on my feet anymore either. Mercifully he grew out of that behavior within a year.

He wakes me not because he wants food or water, but because he wants to be buddies. He wants to purr contentedly as I rub the top of his head and tell him what special, handsome and good boy he is. He wants to thank me by grooming my hair and later, while I am asleep, he’ll groom his butt with his barbed tongue before grooming my face. I’m a lucky man!

He is such a major part of my life that I began writing humorous stories about his exploits and founded this blog at the request of people who wanted more Buddy.

Heck, he’s even become the context by which I define myself online. He is Little Buddy and I am Big Buddy. On this blog I cover cat-related news, post movie and game reviews and write about topics that interest me, but the primary focus has always been Buddy and his adventures, real and imagined.

In many ways it’s absurd. What kind of lunatic writes a blog glorifying his feline friend and imagining him in ridiculous scenarios, like joining Yemeni pirate crews, running his own catnip empire and maintaining a popular OnlyFans account for female admirers?

And yet with Bud, it’s appropriate. He’s crazy in the most endearing, lovable way imaginable. He’s a remarkably vocal cat who trills exuberantly when he’s happy, chats with the speed of an auctioneer when he spots birds, and screeches with unshakable determination when the treats I dispense – or their volume- disappoint him.

Schemeowtics for Buddy the Cat. Note the huge meowscles.

Perhaps most touching of all, there have been three times I’ve gotten debilitatingly ill in the last 12 years, and on each of those occasions Buddy refused to leave my side.

When I was knocked on my ass after finally getting COVID in 2023, Buddy was practically attached to me. Miraculously he did not screech or slap my face when his mealtime came and went. He just let me sleep and purred quietly as he waited for me to wake. Knowing cats were vulnerable to COVID, and having lost a relative and two neighbors to that virus, I thought if I got sick I’d find a way to quarantine myself from Bud for his sake.

That was never going to be an option, I realized in retrospect.

Cynics will say he was worried about his meal ticket, that his survival is pegged to mine. But that’s not true. While Bud has no way of knowing I have made arrangements with my family for one of them to take him if anything happens to me, ensuring he will never end up in a shelter, he misses me dearly when I go away.

I’ll never forget the way he meowed in excitement when I was in Japan and called home to Facetime while my mom was cat-sitting him. He gave me a slow-blink as if unsure if he was really seeing me on the screen, then gave a cry of joy when I blinked back before he launched into one of his usual monologues.

Likewise he always makes a big deal of my arrival back home. The first few times he actually began shaking with emotion and threw up in relief. The poor little guy, I realized, didn’t know if I was coming back. Since then he has a routine that involves pretending he’s angry at me for leaving and feigning ambivalence, which usually lasts about a half hour at most before he drops the act. Then he clings to me even more than usual for a few days.

Yet he does not have an unhealthy attachment. Like all cats, Bud opts for alone time sometimes, and when he shuffles his napping spots every two or three months there’s usually a few days when he prefers napping on the other couch, under the dinner table or on top of a heat vent. Then it’s back to his regularly scheduled lap-napping.

So if the question is “What makes your pal special?” my answer is everything. Every day with him is a gift, and I intend to appreciate every moment of it, even when he’s a royal pain in the Bud.

This post is a response to WordPress’ daily writing prompt: Share a photo of your pet and tell us one thing that makes them uniquely them.

What’s The Funniest Misunderstanding You’ve Ever Been Part Of?

A tale of Big Buddy’s stupidity!

I had a crush on Meghan.

She was a sophomore resident assistant on the second floor of my dorm. Short, blonde and witty, with an easy smile and an understated sense of humor. I really liked her.

The problem was, I couldn’t stop making an ass out of myself in front of her. Whether it was jokes that landed with a thud, awkward encounters or my own general self-sabotage, it just never seemed to go well. Yet she still tolerated me.

While I was getting accustomed to living at school that first year, juggling classes, new friends and easing into the responsibilities of adulthood, I had a minor crisis: my dorm had undergone a “refresh” over the summer, and my room must have been one of the last because I discovered the wood stain they’d used on the dressers hadn’t fully dried.

I came home from class one day to find my roommate wearing a pair of my boxers on his head like a hat and a bunch of my friends laughing at me. All my boxers had sticky, stinky wood stain on them. T-shirts too, which proved I wasn’t soiling myself, but my roommate and friends had a field day with it nonetheless.

I removed all my clothes from the drawers, did a cycle of laundry and was dismayed to see the wood stain stuff hadn’t washed out. I don’t remember how many cycles I did, just that after several attempts the clothes appeared to be clean, finally.

So there I was in the laundry room late at night, crouched in front of an open dryer door, trying to determine if I needed to do one more wash. I reached in, grabbed a fist full of clothes and took a deep huff to make sure I couldn’t smell the wood stain any longer. Was I still smelling the stuff, or was it my imagination? I inhaled deeply again, my nose pressed against the fabric.

That’s when I heard someone behind me. I turned, saw Meghan the RA giving me a half wave with a strange expression on her face, and that’s when I realized the fistful of clothes I’d pulled from the dryer, the clothes I’d been deeply huffing a moment ago, were mostly boxers.

So now Meghan didn’t just see me as a joke-bomber and an idiot. I was also a weirdo who liked to sniff his own underwear.

“Hey Meg, it’s, uh — My clothes. The wood stain wasn’t dry in my room, and it got on my stuff so I, uh…” Ah, @$%! it, I thought. There was no way I was going to explain my way out of this.

So I just accepted she would see me as a weirdo, which she most certainly did at that point, and banished any thought of becoming more than friendly with her.

Sadly that is not my most mortifying moment in college, and there were some comically awful low points, but that one felt particularly shameful. No one wants to be known as a pervert who sniffs his own underwear. No one wants to be that guy.

The lesson here, ladies and gentlemen, is to make sure the coast is absolutely clear if you’re sniffing stubborn dirty clothing after a wash. Or maybe the lesson is not to put your clothes in drawers that have been recently treated with wood stain. Or maybe it’s just about not caring what others think of you. Regardless, it’s a misunderstanding I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

This post is a response to the WordPress daily writing prompt. If you found it amusing, please consider following Pain In The Bud and whitelisting us on your adblocker. Buddy the Cat demands it!

Short Story: The Wrath Of The Cat!

Humans have insulted felinekind for the last time!

Little Buddy was determined to win the prize.

A lavish spread of his most favoritest snacks — including a mouth-watering variety of crunchies, Gouda and American cheese, turkey meaty sticks and more — would be his if he could rush to the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, remove a cold beer, and somehow get it back to his human before the end of the half-inning commercial break during a Yankees broadcast.

“Sixty seconds left!” Big Buddy called from the living room.

Little Buddy panicked. He was still working out how to reliably open the refrigerator door and was worried about whether he’d be able to carry the bottle by gripping the slender part with his teeth, or would be forced to roll it.

With a back paw resting against the adjacent cabinet, Buddy wedged his body against the refrigerator door and, with a bit of wiggling, finally pried it open. Yes!

There it was: the cold beer.

“Thirty seconds!” Big Buddy called.

Oh crap! The feline tried to grab the top of the bottle with his teeth, but it was slippery with condensation and cold.

I’ll have to roll it, then, he conceded.

Working quickly, he had the bottle safely on the floor in a few seconds and began rolling, nudging the icy brew with his nose and correcting its direction with his paws. Think of the snacks, he told himself.

He was out of the kitchen and heading toward the living room, beer rolling along, when Yankees announcer Michael Kay’s voice boomed through the speakers.

“And we’re back here in the bottom of the sixth, Yankees up two runs over the Red Sox,” he said.

“Time!” Big Buddy said, then got up and walked over to where his feline pal was sitting dejected with his shoulders slumped.

The human picked up the beer and cracked it open.

“So close,” he said, shaking his head. “What a shame.”

Little Buddy stared at the floor sadly as Big Buddy walked into the kitchen. Then he heard the unmistakable crinkle of a plastic bag. It was music to his ears, a balm for his soul, relief for his rumbling stomach.

I knew Big Buddy wouldn’t do this to me! he thought. He’s gonna give me that snack spread anyway!

The excited feline came skidding to a halt just inside the kitchen doorway and looked up to find his human digging a few mochi nuggets out of a Trader Joe’s bag. His tail, which had been quivering with excitement a second ago, sank like an inflatable air dancer suddenly deprived of wind.

“Mmmm,” the human said. “These are delicious. Don’t you just love snacks?”

He walked back into the living room and collapsed in his chair, leaving Little Buddy staring longingly up at the inaccessible Cabinet of Yums.

The hollow pop of a fastball discharging its kinetic energy off a wooden bat and the roar of the crowd sounded through the speakers in the next room, sending minute rumbles through the floor that tickled Buddy’s paw pads.

The gods of yums are pooping on me from great heights, he thought. What have I done to deserve this cruel fate?

“He’s training you!”

Little Buddy spun around. Who was meowing to him?

“Up here, dummy!” the voice meowed, and Little Buddy looked up to find a cat the color of a tangerine sitting on the outside window ledge and licking one paw.

“What do you mean by ‘he’s training me?'” Buddy asked the mysterious interloper.

The other feline continued raking his tongue along his paw at an insouciant pace, then finally stopped and looked down.

“He’s conditioning you to retrieve bottles of beer,” the interloper said with certainty. “The promise of a reward lit a fire under your behind, so you didn’t even question the ridiculous ‘challenge.’ And that, my boy, is how humans train lesser creatures like dogs. It is beneath us felines and an insult to our dignity!”

Buddy let the new information sink in.

“That bastard!” he meowed.

“Yes!” the tangerine cat replied.

“He’s treating me like a mutt? A dirty dog?”

“An abominable way to treat a friend, and if I may say so, an insult to your stature!”

Buddy seethed. “I’m supposed to be his best pal! His little buddy!”

“Some might call it a stunning display of absolute contempt for your feelings and your stomach,” the other feline nodded. “Criminal, really.”

“I’m gonna kill him!” Buddy meowed angrily.

The orange cat held up both paws.

“Hold off on that for a minute, will you, pal? If you go scorched Earth right away, you’ll have nothing for when this inevitably escalates.”

Buddy nodded reluctantly. “What did you have in mind?”

Tangerine smiled mischievously.

“My friend,” he trilled, “do you know what a toothbrush is?”

Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. At no time has Bud ever been denied a snack, nor has he ever missed a meal.

Meals missed: 0. Snacks deprived of: 0. Snacks consumed: 10,967. Vet assessment: Slightly chubby. Self assessment: Extremely meowscular, meowscle definition hidden by silky soft coat.

Despite Household Ban On Teleporting, Buddy The Cat Enjoys Tormenting His Human With The Ability

“I could tell his brain was fried! LOL!” Little Buddy the Cat said of his human’s inability to reconcile the feline’s mastery over space and time.

NEW YORK — Buddy the Cat lounged on his back right in the middle of the doorway, making sure his human saw him.

“I did the ‘Meep meep, I’m just a cute kitty cat’ thing, you know?” Buddy explained. “Like I’m so innocently dumb I don’t realize it’s a terrible place to laze around.”

His human, Big Buddy, took an exaggerated stride over him, saying “Bud, you really need to stop …” then looked up.

The feline was 15 feet away and sitting on top of a table, head slightly tilted in amusement as his eyes tracked the confounded human.

“Then I watched him look down at where I was a second ago, then back up at me, and I could tell his brain was fried LOL!” the feline said.

Teleporting is technically banned in Casa de Buddy, but the feline has ignored the ban since he was a kitten. The key, he said, is to “use the ability sparingly, so you drive your human slowly insane as they begin to question reality.”

“It’s so much fun!”

Little known fact: felines have the unique ability to manipulate space-time, which they use primarily to extend their napping hours.

Although human scientists and most members of the species deny the feline ability to teleport, Buddy said it’s actually rather simple to manipulate space-time.

“I just kind of scrunch up my face, try to clear my mind of stuff I normally think about — turkey, being really handsome, turkey — and picture the spot in my head,” he explained. “Then I blink and boom! I’m in a new spot!”

His personal record, he claims, was traveling more than 700 feet when he accidentally teleported himself to the roof of a nearby building after hearing its resident female in heat.

“You know, it was such a charming sound,” Buddy recalled, “but once I teleported there, I didn’t know what to do.”

“A reader suggested it was because I didn’t have Testicles, but I didn’t have Pericles or Socrates either,” Buddy mused. “I’m not sure why I would have needed some old Greek guy. Did the ancient Greeks teleport too?”

A statue of Athenian statesman Pericles. It was suggested to Little Buddy the Cat that he didn’t know what to do when encountering a female in heat because he did not bring any ancient Greeks with him.

The tabby cat said he plans to wait a few days until his human forgets about the teleporting incident, then teleport himself into the passenger seat of the car when Big Buddy is about to drive somewhere.

“I’m thinking of saying ‘Don’t forget your seat belt, mister!’ or something simple like ‘So where are we headed, pal?”” Buddy said. “Haha, he’s gonna freak out!”