Letting a cat get that fat wouldn’t be painful at all.
Because the cat would die long before it reached that point.
There are six levels of fatness. Big, healthy, husky, fluffy, dayumn!, and oh HAYLL no! But while in Lakeland, Florida, I found a SEVENTH level. It’s called “Spencer,” and it’s only seen in cats. Even I wanted to look at this cat and say “get on a treadmill.”
This woman reminds me of my first boyfriend’s mother. I called his house the first time and she answers with a bored “Hello?” I respond “Hi, is Steve there?”
Immediate change of attitude. “OH! Oh! Yes! Yes, he’s here!” *I hear hurrying/running sounds* “STEVE! Steve there’s a GIRL on the phone!!”
I hate to admit it, but that would probably be my reaction if some girl called for my ‘hide in his room and don’t interact with other people” 20-something son. Nice kid, just scared to take the risk of actually dating someone
Why not chaparone a date for him or something like that.
I wonder what it would have been like if my parents kept a silent vigil on their little boy. (Note: I’m taller than James, so keep that in mind with the word ‘little’ there. Ok?)
Just give him a confidence boost. Remind him that if internet explorer is brave enough to ask to be his default browser, he’s brave enough to ask a girl out.
‘Days of Future XYZ’, kind of no matter where you find it, is a reference to the original X-Men plot, ‘Days of Future Past’. Of course, I can’t imagine anyone not knowing this after the movie, so maybe ‘FatFat’ is a Fire Emblem reference, but …
(reference is Shotgun Shuffle comic No thanks to your driving.. currently dated January 21, 2013 & xkcd.com/161 , though that won’t help people who aren’t familiar with the game in the first place)
Just as panic or fear can give adrenaline-fueled strength, enough for a mother to lift a car off of her child, James’ Mom has the strength to lift her cat off the five other cats that it was probably covering.
I don’t know, if a sister is doing time travel Tarra seems like the best guess. I’d say Tarra experiments with time travel and attempts to send a single hair back in time. It succeeded, but became sentient, and somewhat insane. So I’d put James as closer to Ellie’s nephew from that stance.
All those things are what make an imperfect, insane Tarra clone more likely. I mean, it’s practically a certainty and I have no idea how I could’ve ever considered otherwise.
Alternately, maybe James’ mom is Future Anise, who fled into the past in order to escape Future Tarra. The nose looks a bit closer. She would have given Tarra a post-chemo hair cut and then fled to the past to denying Tarra payback after she beat cancer to death and desecrated its remains. It’d also explain why Tarra bee-lined it for Anise, in an attempt to kill her before said haircut and rob her of both victories.
.
She could have normalized a bit after becoming a mother. Having known an Anise or two, the only difference I’ve seen is the ones who have pets collect more than just cats. Maybe after Ellie leaves we’ll get a Joker moment (Jack Nicholson), where she wipes off the flesh-colored make-up to reveal tattoos.
Maybe a future Anise that loses both eyes, and the robotic replacements that she gets a guilty Tarra to make for her are the result we see in this comic.
It’s been too long since we’ve spouted these types of theories in the comments.
Like the title, too…first there was always a younger teenager and then there was always a fatter cat.
It screams, “Maybe I will have grandkids after all!”
It’s going to be really sad for his mom when Ellie doesn’t go out with him again. He’s nice but she’s basically doing this for a job and hopefully Ellie can give him the steps to getting girls on his own.
Step #1: Move out of your parents house because the mother is crazy and there are too many cats. Step #2:…uh confidence really.
Honestly, he just needs to get out of that house, it (and maybe somehow being a bigger nerd than I am) is killing his lady cred.
There are judgement aspects past confidence. I could see, “Calm down, and for the rest of the date I’m going to hit you on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when you start spazing out too much” being helpful.
I just have to ask – was the title based on the ‘Summon Bigger Fish’ scene from Darths&Droids? It seems fitting, somehow.
Also, this is my first time commenting, so Hi!
I also got a letter from Patreon’s Jack ( can’t remember his last name.) referencing the spoofed scam mail and how ludicrous it would have been for the blackmailer to have all of the information that he claims to have in his little illegitimately grubbing hands. Who cried crocodile tears when she couldn’t grub, along with her husband Hank.
Anyway. I wrote Patreon about finding out what to do about the blackmailer, as well as looking up information about my own police department’s departments that may or may not handle this type of crime.
Aw, I’m disappointed a letter from Jack wasn’t a Fight Club reference.
Your local police dept is unlikely to do anything aside from maybe pass it on and more likely tell you who to better report to. At this time it’d be an online threat and attempted fraud, but nothing successful, so without someone in their jurisdiction suffering actual harm and the perpetrator likely in another jurisdiction, they aren’t likely to pursue themselves. Your state attorney general office likely pays attention to fraud and fraud attempts in your state and will have a place to forward a report. The FTC and/or FBI should have places to send it too. None of those three are likely to be real active about pursuing it, but they will collect and pay attention to how many they get, and the more they get the more likely they’ll put resources into going after the person responsible. When you pass it along to any authority you should forward both the fraudulent and real e-mails as attachments (just normal forward will lose the e-mail headers, and possibly if they tried doing anything tricky in the e-mail itself), to give an example of the fake and real e-mail (should be mismatch in headers).
As a patron and not a creator, the only financial info that Patreon should have for you is your credit card number. As long as you used a real credit card and since you live in the US, you have a maximum of $50 liability on fraud guaranteed by federal law. For market reasons, most banks make that $0 liability. So in that instance, all you have to do is watch your statement and contest the charges (call the number on the back of your card and it should be a menu option). That’s why Patreon has a deliberately low use card, so it’s easier for me to watch (I have another card that honestly a scammer could slip through some additional small purchases at gas stations or grocery stores I frequent and I probably wouldn’t notice). Additionally, if you want, you could pre-emptively call the number on the back of your card and go to the fraud dept from the menu and tell them about it (maybe it’ll change things, maybe not), but that honestly doesn’t matter if you watch your bill.
If you used a pre-paid card, I don’t know that you have any protection for the money on that card, so if you have enough on the card to care about, you might consider getting a new pre-paid card and draining what’s on the current one and swapping your Patreon payment method to the new one.
If you used a debit card, that’s a really bad idea and I’d immediately switch Patreon to either an actual credit card or a pre-paid card (you can buy them in gas stations, Wal-Mart, or similar for something like $5-$10 plus the money you put on it, but watch out as there’s a monthly fee so it’ll slowly drain, I heard American Express has a decent one, alternate name to pre-paid card is stored value card). After that, I’d go to your bank and request to get your debit card number changed and then NEVER use that new debit card for anything but ATM (especially never use on Internet or pay-at-the-pump gas pumps). The safety/danger of debit cards is all on the bank’s policies, so it’s possible it’s ok but I never trust them. I’d do all that even if I fully believed Patreon about what the hackers got.
If you were a creator and believed Patreon wasn’t being fully honest (for example, if their hackers might’ve had an ability to get the encryption keys for their stored encrypted tax info), then the appropriate thing to do would be the normal ID theft protection steps of I don’t quite remember the term but it’s either freezing or putting a fraud alert on your credit. Basically you contact the three credit agencies for yearly reports to contest things that don’t belong there and set up a password every three years so that they refuse any attempts to run your credit if you don’t pre-notify them with the password for that particular institution. The FTC should have a page explaining the options (or see next paragraph).
The other place you can report the scam (verbally) if you’d like, is Clark Howard and he’ll likely mention it on his show to warn other people and/or post it on his website, though with Patreon sending out the warning to all, the extra warning is less necessary. He does also give lots of advice on financial matters and I’m sure his website will have suggestions for any of the above even if you don’t report the scam to him and are worried about it.
Past that, the only thing to do is not follow any instructions the scammers sent you. Don’t open attachments or follow links, they’re likely to attempt to infect you with malware so they can actually steal more info from you (or they might go the cryptolocker route of encrypting your files and charging you for the decryption key). If you’re really unlucky, just reading their message could be enough to infect you, but I haven’t heard of drive-by downloads coming as part of mail messages as common, and I’d think it would be if it were easy to do (I guess some JavaScript might get stripped out or not processed by mail client or web host for you, and I don’t think they can embed Java, Flash, or PDF, and I think graphics library flaws generally require obviously bad graphics and are rarer). If your mail client supports it, it’s better to read questionable messages as plain text rather than HTML or rich text.
Hello my friend, I am Jack’s minister of the Treasury of Nigeria, and I need to speaking with you about a matter of 20,000,000 $US…
I am Jack’s spleen and provided you have an active bank account, I think you’d be a perfect candidate for a work-at-home job receiving and sending out payments with our company.
I am Jack’s hot Eastern European model who is inexplicably single and looking for love with foreign men via the internet. I would gladly marry you but require $4000 wired to me to cover a lawyer and fees to get into the country…
Spencer needs a Harkonnen-syle hoverchair. Or perhaps, in his case, a hover-litterbox.
119 thoughts on “There’s Always a Fatter Cat”
Damn, that’s one fat cat!
I kinda feel sorry for him.
What that is is animal abuse. Letting a pet get that fat must be extremely painful for it.
Letting a cat get that fat wouldn’t be painful at all.
Because the cat would die long before it reached that point.
There are six levels of fatness. Big, healthy, husky, fluffy, dayumn!, and oh HAYLL no! But while in Lakeland, Florida, I found a SEVENTH level. It’s called “Spencer,” and it’s only seen in cats. Even I wanted to look at this cat and say “get on a treadmill.”
It’s like if Jabba the Hutt had sex with a Snorlax.
That’s no moon…
I have a bad feeling about this…
… That’s a Manx, Peyton!
DAMMIT, that was my first thought!
Sorry James, your college fund is gone!
We spent it all on cat food….
This woman reminds me of my first boyfriend’s mother. I called his house the first time and she answers with a bored “Hello?” I respond “Hi, is Steve there?”
Immediate change of attitude. “OH! Oh! Yes! Yes, he’s here!” *I hear hurrying/running sounds* “STEVE! Steve there’s a GIRL on the phone!!”
I had to work so hard to keep it together.
I hate to admit it, but that would probably be my reaction if some girl called for my ‘hide in his room and don’t interact with other people” 20-something son. Nice kid, just scared to take the risk of actually dating someone
Why not chaparone a date for him or something like that.
I wonder what it would have been like if my parents kept a silent vigil on their little boy. (Note: I’m taller than James, so keep that in mind with the word ‘little’ there. Ok?)
Just give him a confidence boost. Remind him that if internet explorer is brave enough to ask to be his default browser, he’s brave enough to ask a girl out.
I don’t know, I think that might cause him to confuse bravery with shamelessness.
*puts down cookie*
*takes your cookie.*
*Grabs another cookie for Magus*
Wait, Days of Future FatFat…Rusch, are you a Fire Emblem fan!? If so awesome! if not, awesome coincidence lol
Still, I’d hate to imagine what his mom would be like if he ever actually gets married…*shudders*
‘Days of Future XYZ’, kind of no matter where you find it, is a reference to the original X-Men plot, ‘Days of Future Past’. Of course, I can’t imagine anyone not knowing this after the movie, so maybe ‘FatFat’ is a Fire Emblem reference, but …
Or, given other musical themes/memes scattered throughout the story line, it could refer to “Days of Future Passed” by the Moody Blues.
Even the cat’s face is a melting puddle of flab. That there is a vat of jello in a furry suit.
Yeah, the face was what really got me. Enough fat for a head to seem malleable and squishy is quite extreme.
The horror…
That’s every cat owning girl’s dream and my nightmare of a cat.
That’s no cat, that’s a space station!
That’s no cat, it’s a bean bag. With a face. I think.
I dunno about you, but the beanbags in my experience don’t come with claws or teeth.
Then you haven’t truly lived.
In Soviet Russia, beanbag sits on YOU!
That’s frightening for an animal that craps in your house.
I’m being that they’ve got a screened in back yard, with screened in roof sections to keep bugs out and cats in.
You sir, have your priorities straight.
I had a neighbor who had a fat cat. He was not only a large frame feline but not quite in the Jabba the Hutt size here.
Mom had adopted a large frame kitty, named her Mercedes. But she was neither svelte nor fat. Muffin-esqe maybe?
This is what happens when a panther breeds with a sloth.
Spencer, for higher weights and kibbles.
I see what you did there!
Last panel with that comment from Elle, just had me laughing :)
Reminds me of Cousin Boneless from Cow and Chicken.
SAILCAT!
Egad!!!! What’s that! That’s no cat!?
If anything else, that “thing” just roam around the house and absorb and fuse with any cats that it can get it’s paws on. O.O
It’s the patient negative two to the minnaverse.
“You gotta be [bleep]in’ kidding me.”
Maybe it’s the result of James trying to play a real life version of Katamari Damacy with cats…
You think that was his problem driving too?
(reference is Shotgun Shuffle comic No thanks to your driving.. currently dated January 21, 2013 & xkcd.com/161 , though that won’t help people who aren’t familiar with the game in the first place)
James mom must have incredible upper body strength.
Her brand of insanity lends a peculiar, cat-specific strength.
Just as panic or fear can give adrenaline-fueled strength, enough for a mother to lift a car off of her child, James’ Mom has the strength to lift her cat off the five other cats that it was probably covering.
There is just no comparison…McFatFat doesn’t even come close; however, he would win in a fight…just swallow him up and poop him out…
McFF would need an awful lot of fiber to make that happen.
Okay, it CAN’T be my imagination that the cat looks like Spencer Tracy. Rusche, you’re an evil genius!
I wonder if a kitty defibrillator would even get through that cat’s outer hull….
Conspiracy theory: James is Ellie’s son and Ellie becomes a time traveller. So James mom is future Ellie :P
So then who did future Ellie marry? Is James actually his own father?
I don’t know, if a sister is doing time travel Tarra seems like the best guess. I’d say Tarra experiments with time travel and attempts to send a single hair back in time. It succeeded, but became sentient, and somewhat insane. So I’d put James as closer to Ellie’s nephew from that stance.
Did Ellie get a breast reduction before or after the time travel?
And a height injection, a nosejob, hips reduced, and began dyeing her eyebrows….
All those things are what make an imperfect, insane Tarra clone more likely. I mean, it’s practically a certainty and I have no idea how I could’ve ever considered otherwise.
Alternately, maybe James’ mom is Future Anise, who fled into the past in order to escape Future Tarra. The nose looks a bit closer. She would have given Tarra a post-chemo hair cut and then fled to the past to denying Tarra payback after she beat cancer to death and desecrated its remains. It’d also explain why Tarra bee-lined it for Anise, in an attempt to kill her before said haircut and rob her of both victories.
.
She could have normalized a bit after becoming a mother. Having known an Anise or two, the only difference I’ve seen is the ones who have pets collect more than just cats. Maybe after Ellie leaves we’ll get a Joker moment (Jack Nicholson), where she wipes off the flesh-colored make-up to reveal tattoos.
Maybe a future Anise that loses both eyes, and the robotic replacements that she gets a guilty Tarra to make for her are the result we see in this comic.
It’s been too long since we’ve spouted these types of theories in the comments.
Like the title, too…first there was always a younger teenager and then there was always a fatter cat.
His mom is kinda hot tho.
Even with the crazy eyes?
That’s just enthusiasm.
It screams, “Maybe I will have grandkids after all!”
It’s going to be really sad for his mom when Ellie doesn’t go out with him again. He’s nice but she’s basically doing this for a job and hopefully Ellie can give him the steps to getting girls on his own.
Step #1: Move out of your parents house because the mother is crazy and there are too many cats. Step #2:…uh confidence really.
Honestly, he just needs to get out of that house, it (and maybe somehow being a bigger nerd than I am) is killing his lady cred.
There are judgement aspects past confidence. I could see, “Calm down, and for the rest of the date I’m going to hit you on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when you start spazing out too much” being helpful.
Ellie glimpses her terrifying future!
Bwha… that cat is really, really, fat; but it still has arms and legs. WHAT SORCERY IS THIS!?
She is actually very Chill about this whole thing…
That’s not chill, that’s “in shock”.
Also probably winded from the weight of the cat leaning back into her torso.
I just have to ask – was the title based on the ‘Summon Bigger Fish’ scene from Darths&Droids? It seems fitting, somehow.
Also, this is my first time commenting, so Hi!
Warning: lots of readers get hooked on commenting: once stey start they need a fix every day, then multiple comments every day, then ….
That’s ok. We welcome more people.
Welcome, Eitan55, by the way. Sadly I can’t answer your question with certainty, though.
Damnit Fogel,
You’re making us sound like old fogies.
Some of us are old fogies….
Welcome to the Matrix, Mr. Anderson.
Beware the Jabbermom, my spice!
The cams that snap, the eyes that catch!
Beware the mint-in-box, and shun
The bulbious Gantercat!
We’re gunna need a bigger lap.
Spencer seems to me like proof positive that McFatFat contains something along the lines of a portal or a black hole or something.
TARDIScat, bigger on the inside.
Does it come with a swimming pool?
Maybe, but it’s definitely strongly advised that you bathe after using that pool rather than before if there is.
Ellie should have just let him buy new tickets…
How much insulin does Spencer require daily? (I know a couple whose sumo-cats lined up for their insulin: proly makes them feel better?)
Is it me or does Spence have that distinct “kill me” look on his face?
I’m getting more of a, “Woah! That’s a workout. Looks like it’s getting towards time to take a nap.”-type vibe
Phew. Finally caught up with most my comics again after my holiday.
Should have stayed in the car….
…still waiting for Durkin to bust in through a window. Would probably be appreciated right about now.
But would he get any of those Peacan Sandies?
AND the tour!
My God.. That cat is it’s own gravity well…
…and it’s full of stars…
Gods! u call that a cat? thats more like a bear!
Even Ellie’s cat is’t that bad!
Or that might be becouse he has a more practical form :s
Oh the humanatees.
This is Florida man.
Manatees.
I went to school with Hugh Manatees. Good guy. Had a cat, too.
Was it round?
Hell with that. Did that cat swim
In an emergency, it was equipped to function as a floatation device.
WOW ….just wow he makes garfield look Svelte….and i hope her job comes with good health insurance lol
He makes Bill Murray sounds like he just ate John Candy.
Doesn’t he know eating too much Candy is bad for you.
I think Sushi Cat is McFatfat’s cousin.
Discuss is nise. I kin kept her
Hey fellow Patreons. Have any of you received an email? From Jack?
Yep – sounds like Patreon’s come under quite a bit of fire as of late for some reason.
Can’t say that I did, no. And the only bad thing I’ve heard about Patreon lately was them getting hacked and user date being stolen a while ago.
Correction, I did. It just got sucked into my spam folder and I had to fish it out.
And it actually seems connected with what I mentioned above.
I also got a letter from Patreon’s Jack ( can’t remember his last name.) referencing the spoofed scam mail and how ludicrous it would have been for the blackmailer to have all of the information that he claims to have in his little illegitimately grubbing hands. Who cried crocodile tears when she couldn’t grub, along with her husband Hank.
Anyway. I wrote Patreon about finding out what to do about the blackmailer, as well as looking up information about my own police department’s departments that may or may not handle this type of crime.
Aw, I’m disappointed a letter from Jack wasn’t a Fight Club reference.
Your local police dept is unlikely to do anything aside from maybe pass it on and more likely tell you who to better report to. At this time it’d be an online threat and attempted fraud, but nothing successful, so without someone in their jurisdiction suffering actual harm and the perpetrator likely in another jurisdiction, they aren’t likely to pursue themselves. Your state attorney general office likely pays attention to fraud and fraud attempts in your state and will have a place to forward a report. The FTC and/or FBI should have places to send it too. None of those three are likely to be real active about pursuing it, but they will collect and pay attention to how many they get, and the more they get the more likely they’ll put resources into going after the person responsible. When you pass it along to any authority you should forward both the fraudulent and real e-mails as attachments (just normal forward will lose the e-mail headers, and possibly if they tried doing anything tricky in the e-mail itself), to give an example of the fake and real e-mail (should be mismatch in headers).
As a patron and not a creator, the only financial info that Patreon should have for you is your credit card number. As long as you used a real credit card and since you live in the US, you have a maximum of $50 liability on fraud guaranteed by federal law. For market reasons, most banks make that $0 liability. So in that instance, all you have to do is watch your statement and contest the charges (call the number on the back of your card and it should be a menu option). That’s why Patreon has a deliberately low use card, so it’s easier for me to watch (I have another card that honestly a scammer could slip through some additional small purchases at gas stations or grocery stores I frequent and I probably wouldn’t notice). Additionally, if you want, you could pre-emptively call the number on the back of your card and go to the fraud dept from the menu and tell them about it (maybe it’ll change things, maybe not), but that honestly doesn’t matter if you watch your bill.
If you used a pre-paid card, I don’t know that you have any protection for the money on that card, so if you have enough on the card to care about, you might consider getting a new pre-paid card and draining what’s on the current one and swapping your Patreon payment method to the new one.
If you used a debit card, that’s a really bad idea and I’d immediately switch Patreon to either an actual credit card or a pre-paid card (you can buy them in gas stations, Wal-Mart, or similar for something like $5-$10 plus the money you put on it, but watch out as there’s a monthly fee so it’ll slowly drain, I heard American Express has a decent one, alternate name to pre-paid card is stored value card). After that, I’d go to your bank and request to get your debit card number changed and then NEVER use that new debit card for anything but ATM (especially never use on Internet or pay-at-the-pump gas pumps). The safety/danger of debit cards is all on the bank’s policies, so it’s possible it’s ok but I never trust them. I’d do all that even if I fully believed Patreon about what the hackers got.
If you were a creator and believed Patreon wasn’t being fully honest (for example, if their hackers might’ve had an ability to get the encryption keys for their stored encrypted tax info), then the appropriate thing to do would be the normal ID theft protection steps of I don’t quite remember the term but it’s either freezing or putting a fraud alert on your credit. Basically you contact the three credit agencies for yearly reports to contest things that don’t belong there and set up a password every three years so that they refuse any attempts to run your credit if you don’t pre-notify them with the password for that particular institution. The FTC should have a page explaining the options (or see next paragraph).
The other place you can report the scam (verbally) if you’d like, is Clark Howard and he’ll likely mention it on his show to warn other people and/or post it on his website, though with Patreon sending out the warning to all, the extra warning is less necessary. He does also give lots of advice on financial matters and I’m sure his website will have suggestions for any of the above even if you don’t report the scam to him and are worried about it.
Past that, the only thing to do is not follow any instructions the scammers sent you. Don’t open attachments or follow links, they’re likely to attempt to infect you with malware so they can actually steal more info from you (or they might go the cryptolocker route of encrypting your files and charging you for the decryption key). If you’re really unlucky, just reading their message could be enough to infect you, but I haven’t heard of drive-by downloads coming as part of mail messages as common, and I’d think it would be if it were easy to do (I guess some JavaScript might get stripped out or not processed by mail client or web host for you, and I don’t think they can embed Java, Flash, or PDF, and I think graphics library flaws generally require obviously bad graphics and are rarer). If your mail client supports it, it’s better to read questionable messages as plain text rather than HTML or rich text.
Hello my friend, I am Jack’s minister of the Treasury of Nigeria, and I need to speaking with you about a matter of 20,000,000 $US…
I am Jack’s spleen and provided you have an active bank account, I think you’d be a perfect candidate for a work-at-home job receiving and sending out payments with our company.
I am Jack’s hot Eastern European model who is inexplicably single and looking for love with foreign men via the internet. I would gladly marry you but require $4000 wired to me to cover a lawyer and fees to get into the country…
Spencer needs a Harkonnen-syle hoverchair. Or perhaps, in his case, a hover-litterbox.
James’ Mom: “Mrow want him to know that Mrow, Baron Spencer Harkatten, am the hisstrument of his fameow’s de-mice,” right James?
James: (horrified silence)
Whoops, meant that as a reply to Noclevername (http://shotgunshuffle.com/comic/theres-always-a-fatter-cat/comment-page-1/#comment-243966), my fellow inaccurate nom de guerre holder.
Wait, is that Cartman in a fur-suit? o_O