when the bluejay asks shiloh "why are you acting like this" it implies that she knows shiloh to act very differently. i know that shiloh has gravitated toward extremes since she was a teenager, but because their friendship goes so far back, i want to think that the bluejay is referring to personality traits that she's observed from shiloh (or projected onto them) since childhood. i haven't thought much about what shiloh was like as a child, so perhaps i will explore it at some point. what the script tells us is that shiloh reports being "bored for most of their life" which one can reasonably assume includes some of their childhood

The photos break my heart but I'm so glad I have them. As many of you probably know I have aphantasia. I see like, black in my head most of the time. Maybe vague greyish silhouettes if I feel inspired. Once someone is gone, they're GONE in my brain. I can't think of mawkish and see her in my head again.

Really funny when somebody will be aware enough to understand the political implications of only being attracted to people based on their weight but not only being attracted to people based on their height or they'll get making fun of somebody's weight is fucked up but making fun of somebody's height is chill

She really would sit on her little donut bed in the morning. She found it uncomfortable for me to carry her in my arms, so I decided to start carrying her up and down the stairs on a bed or pillow. That picture is her sitting on the bed, on the grip carpets next to the stairs so she wouldn't slip

Dude I can't even quantify how much I miss her. She always gave me this one specific look and her eyes were so full of love

examples:

trouble's logic tends to be self-centered. she will say things without extrapolating how it will make the person she's talking to feel. i think she can, eventually, get a feel for common reactions from people she says things to frequently, but this would generalize to things like "saying anything makes jessie angry" or "saying this person's name will make them pay attention to me" rather than a more complex theory of mind. things like "saying something can be rude with certain words or not rude with other words, even if it's the exact same message" are just patently absurd to her on concept. she understands the idea of being rude, so she can be rude on purpose, but this is largely communicated physically, to her. it isn't necessarily that she has no concept of other people thinking or feeling things -- it's just that if it's not pertinent to her, a dog has no motivation to think of such things. the person she'd be most likely to have motivation to consider is emily, so trouble might know and anticipate emily's thought patterns more than others'. she can definitely anticipate other dogs' reactions because they think like she does. i don't want her to talk like a caveman, necessarily. but i also tend to keep her sentences shorter. you can see in her dialogue and decisions there are a lot of references back to her. i don't think she would understand the concept of "old" if she hadn't personally experienced aging herself. she generally can't anticipate too many things that she's never experienced, even when it's directly communicated to her; you could tell her that a car can squish her body and kill her if she runs into the road, but she would probably internalize this as "if i walk on the road when x person is around, they get upset at me" unless she saw something like something else being hit by a car first. obviously she would walk around someone just standing there, so the suggestion that a car would go straight over her instead of just walking around her is absurd to her. if you told her that cars LIKE to squish you if you're in the road which can kill you then she might be able to understand this by connecting it to an experience with a bigger, ruder dog bowling her over. it can be hard to write her dialogue because speaking necessarily means that she's anticipating SOME reaction from the person she's speaking to, but the limited scope of understanding is weird and how she arrives at the expectations she has in an interaction can be unintuitive.

everyone in the family feels a little weird in different ways about it. i think evelyn is the chillest about it. it just makes communicating a lot more direct. in the above portion where she calls adam "dad," there was something about adam seeming hesitant/uncomfortable with her calling him that, but i'm on the fence about it. to trouble that's just a word you can say to get this particular person's attention. she probably learned it from emily, specifically. emily does her best to cope with the change in dynamic, i know i've been trying to gear myself up to write a sketch strip where trouble and emily talk about trouble's experience dying and her thoughts on the fact that emily had her euthanized. emily probably finds it more stressful than trouble does, as she has more ethical expectations for herself and others than trouble does. i've made a joke that emily mentions trouble talking makes her uncomfortable Once and trouble just never says anything again. generally trouble doesn't speak to strangers at all; she's been taught to ignore them long before she can talk. i don't think trouble feels weird about it. "weird" is probably not a concept she would grasp strongly. something is either threatening, interesting, or nothing. "weird" to trouble would just be threatening. the amount she expects the family dynamic to NOT change even though she can talk is probably weird to the other family members. relatedly, it's never really implied that trouble wants to stand up -- the opposite, even.

Trouble's dialogue is hard to write because I still don't want her to speak EXACTLY like a person?? I want her to have the logic and social expectations of a dog.

I would not consider Mawkish a particularly smart dog, lmao. But she had like a thousand nicknames because Laika would flip out if she heard the word Mawkish, run around the house screaming and whining (probably sounded too much like walk). The impressive part was that Mawkish recognized and remembered all of these nicknames, she would respond to some even after a decade of no use.

God. Laika dying sucked. She was a border collie so she was a very smart dog. The fact that she understood what was happening to her was apparent in the way she'd look at you. It was like having a four year old who knew they were dying and couldn't talk. Maybe the comprehension of death was limited but there was definitely enough comprehension to understand she really, really didn't want it to happen. If any dog should have been euthanized it was her. I told them so many times she needed to be put down, they just didn't fucking listen to me, man

Every time I scroll past a picture of mawkish on my blog my brain goes "oh my god mawkish there you are I'm so glad I found you" before it processes that it's just pixels on a screen, not my dog in my doorway, it really sucks

bro i need my playfulness and joie de vivre to return from the dissociation wars