orange cat stories

reports from the scroll

Apr 07, 2025

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Nobody talks about this part of life in China is the hook for every TikTok video by this male model with a Russian accent. He eats a small breakfast, models clothes for an e-retailer, plays three hours of Counterstrike at the computer cafe, and then is hired to go to a club and entertain wealthy women until 2 AM.

“inverse Anora but in China” reads one of the four comments on his video.

His camera always checks in with the gray cat at the computer cafe, which is kept in a transparent cage like a zoo enclosure. “I wish I could help it, but foreigners have no rights in China,” he says. It looks like the same breed as Taylor Swift’s cats.

He quotes the “inverse Anora” comment on his next video, as the final thing onscreen, saying: “I liked this comment.” He has under 2,000 followers.

Orange cat, of the AI-generated cat stories, starts his day bolting out of bed with the alarm, scans some app with Chinese writing on it to pay for the vegetables he buys at the market. Then he goes out into the field and murders the boar. He is always cooking some kind of ornate noodle dish with the meat of whichever fellow animal he kills. And he never misses zither practice: at the end of each video I’ve seen pop up in my feed, he closes his eyes and strums, blissed-out.

After listening to Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of “That Funny Feeling” because someone on TikTok used it over an early 2000s nostalgia slideshow, I went to the search bar to find the Bo Burnham original and discovered Spotify’s algorithm had helpfully created an “Existential Dread Mix” for me.

Shuffling it, the first song that came up was Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For.” And my first thought was — “that’s the song they put on those orange AI cat story slideshows, with all the lyrics replaced by meows.”

Here is a young Gazan woman looking at us and saying don’t scroll, even if you don’t have money to give, just interact with this post. Search “Christmas gifts” in the search bar to help get this video on the FYP. Just do this simple thing and you can help us.

Hundreds of thousands of people have already liked, saved, reposted, and commented with keywords they think the algorithm will enjoy.

Oh, that’s such a useful hack to know. Interesting perspective on ecology. Elon has produced thirteen kids and counting, but killed thousands because the USAID peanut butter for malnourished children rots at port, never shipped out. The population crisis.

I hadn’t been aware “That Funny Feeling” was an actual song by someone. I’d thought it was just a sincerity-cringe TikTok thing, a trend where you would write a verse corresponding to the latest thing gone wrong or weird in our world, strum it on guitar, sing the chorus:

There it is, again, that funny feeling. That funny feeling.

Their wistful naming of a thing that won’t be changed reminds me of the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is

the structures of capitalism, says this 22-year-old, the toxicity of men, says this 17-year-old. Meanwhile, this dude here plays a heart-wrenching acoustic ballad, enviably well.

Now you are glassy-eyed, thoughts tumbling about the skull like clothes in a washing machine with a key lost in some pocket. Remember how Tim Cheese unalived John Pork to the tune of Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart?”

You rarely watch all the way through. Look at his fingers on the onion as he chops it, iridescent slices skitter across the hot skillet. Your own thoughts interrupt, your worries weave into theirs. You are trying your best to listen, because nobody else seems to be listening.

Orange cat has tricked the pig into coming over, and brutally murdered him. Now he is cooking, and pulls out his phone. The AI-generated panda bear answers, riding on his motorcycle. He comes over, they drink red wine together.

For some reason, I think of a night that for the first time in my successive rememberings seems to have been a long time ago. Red wine on a terrasse with the boys, watching Friday circle and settle on rue Descartes like a dog before it finds the just-right position to sleep in.

Fat black plastic trash bags piled on the streetside because the garbage collectors are on strike and the government is crooked. Maybe all this has been a brief interregnum, and while war for now means, to me, a higher heating bill and worried conversations in cafes, tomorrow it will mean otherwise.

It is inevitable as the fact this place will close at midnight or my visa will end in six months. Other people talking, elbow to elbow at little tables. You and I are likely more ready for it than we think.

The buzzing and blurring of voices brings to mind the cicada swarm that arrived the year before. You could hear their drone flow and ebb all afternoon in the trees like a pulse. The Washington Post said in previous years there had been more, but now so much of the area has been paved over with asphalt that they can’t dig their way up out of the earth. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

10.

I’m running an experiment here, says a girl with kind eyes, a ring-light’s reflection in each broad pupil, subtitles below, each word flashing red then white before disappearing. If you’re on the Amanda Seyfried singing Joni Mitchell with a dulcimer side of TikTok, were you also on the Serge Gainsbourg children’s choir side of TikTok? Let me know in the comments.

On est venu te dire qu’on t’aime bien. Sitting in a park in Paris, France, reading the news and it sure looks bad, they won’t give peace a chance.

11.

A man in finance, trust fund, six five, blue eyes sits across from us at the cafe, and I watch sugar dissolve in his espresso. Like clicking a hyperlink, my mind latches onto the torn paper packet and imagines its journey in reverse: stocked by the bisexual barista, carried on a truck from wholesaler to here, from factory to wholesaler, transported in unprocessed form to the factory, floated across in a big cargo ship, harvested in the field somewhere tropical. You and I don’t actually know how sugar gets made.

But six five blue eyes paid for the sauna at his second home by anticipating the value others would predict the price of sugar to be at three years hence and then swapping the marginal derivative of the asset’s liquidity to the market maker at JP Morgan for a fractional return of the T-bond intercept’s asset futures bundled in an ETF hedged by the adjustable rate mortgage of a retired woman named Gretchen living in Phoenix, whose book club is currently reading It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover.

12.

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