Fish Photo Shoot!

March 26, 2017 by Mr. Academy in Cheatsheet, Adoption, Graduation

Hello, Kitten Academicians!

We've got some photos of the Fish and Angel for you -- some from two weeks ago, and some from last night. I bet you can tell which are which!

Before that, though, a moment of news: Java was picked up at On Angels' Wings today by his adopter. As he's left the academy before graduation, he's officially our first "drop out!" A lot of famous people have dropped out and still managed great things, so we hope for the best. But we'd encourage all of you to stay in school nonetheless! Don't be a Java!

His adopter will be returning to OAW with him when he's ready to be fixed, so that will be taken care of. Unfortunately, this adoption was arranged before he came to the Kitten Academy, so it's uncertain whether we'll be able to expect any updates later.

Star's doing very well in her recovery, and we're hopeful that soon we'll feel comfortable letting her spend as much time as she likes with her kittens. We'd also like to offer her the option of roaming the Academy grounds with the Faculty cats, but we're cautious about introducing too many new and exciting situations while she's convalescing.

So, that's all the important news - let's get to the photos!

Introducing the Coffee Cats!

March 20, 2017 by Mr. Academy in Cheatsheet, Introduction

On March 19th, the Coffee Cats transferred to Kitten Academy from one of the other fosters at On Angels' Wings. They're already nearly ready to graduate - we anticipate they'll only need to stay at the Academy for a couple of weeks.

We'll put together a video and add them to the weight chart as soon as we can! In the meantime, here's your kitten identification guide!

Latte can be identified by his lack of collar (if he is wearing it, it's blue, but he seems to prefer to not). In addition, his orange spots on his back are broken up with a lot of white, while Frappe and Caramel are more solid.

Caramel's easily identified by his black collar.

Frappe has a pink collar, and more white on her haunches. Frappe has already been adopted, but will still be staying to finish her classes at the Academy!

Mocha has a brown and pink collar.

Java has a distinct white tail tip - a little hard to see here. Java has also already been adopted, but will be staying on to finish out the semester.

Bean is black and white!

Here's some extra photos of the Coffee Cats!

Fonts Graduation!

March 17, 2017 by Mr. Academy in Graduation, Adoption

The Fonts have certainly been a memorable class at the Kitten Academy! Pregnant momcat Arial was taken in, and then immediately delivered her babies while in the care of Animal Control. Shortly after, she and her kittens were admitted to the Kitten Academy. When Charlie later joined the class, she instantly accepted him as one of her own. While Charlie played the rougher, bigger brother to the Fonts, the Fonts also taught him a lot about being a cat! And Arial was a wonderful mom to all.

Normally, these graduation announcements are thinly-veiled pleas for adopters to adopt our graduates. But the Fonts class represents a milestone in Kitten Academy history - this is the first time that you wonderful Kitten Academy viewers have adopted all the kittens prior to graduation! You truly are the best people in the world!

Zapf and Baskerville were adopted together, and so were Gary and Winnie. It's always a pleasure to see these kittens go in pairs, since they love each other so much already.

Our momcat, Arial, has some potential applicants -- and so does our former momcat, Velvet, who's still enjoying her time at On Angels' Wings. However, Velvet's already had two applications fall through, so if you're thinking of adopting either of these wonderful cats, please don't let the fact that there's a line stop you from putting in an application now. If nothing else, it will help ensure you're pre-approved when the next wonderful cat comes available!

The Fonts had their spay/neuter, vaccinations, and microchipping yesterday. They will go to their adopters tomorrow, Saturday the 18th. Except Arial, who will go to On Angels' Wings in Crystal Lake.

Here are our graduation photos. As a quick side-note, the less awesome camera we are currently using had some issues focusing, and so just by chance, the majority of the good photos we got were of Gary. If you're following the saga of our good camera, which Custard broke when he knocked it off a desk, we've just recently been informed by Sony that as an apology for the length of time the repair has been taking, they are just going to ship us a brand new replacement for the good camera! We expect that to arrive in a week or two. Then maybe we'll be able to get back on track with some good video and photos!

As usual, here's the rest of the photos from our shoot:

Mewsbits, Photos, and Yearbook!

March 13, 2017 by Mr. Academy in Adoption, Graduation

Hello everyone! We'd like to open this Mewspaper entry by expressing our sincere appreciation for all of you! You are over 5,000 Twitterers, nearly 200,000 YouTubers, almost 500 Patreons, and almost 3,500 Facebookers! The outpouring of love and support for the kittens and the live stream are nothing short of amazing. You are surely the best people in the world!

And speaking of numbers, Charlie's adopter set up a Twitter account to share photos of him (which you can find by clicking here) and roughly 1500 of you had followed it within the first twelve hours! The mind boggles!

The Fonts are scheduled for Graduation (spay/neuter/etc) on the 16th! They will return here to recover for a couple of days, and then go to their adopters. In a Kitten Academy first (but hopefully not last) all four of the Font kittens have been adopted already! Gary and Winnie will be living together in their forever home, and likewise, Baskerville and Zapf will be sharing their adventures post-graduation. While there's at least one or two applications in for Arial, nothing is certain for her quite yet. If you're interested in Arial, who is a perfect and affectionate cat for a quiet home with no other animals, please apply via On Angels' Wings in Crystal Lake.

On the subject of adoptions, we're told that Velvet is in a similar position currently - there are a couple of potential applications, but nothing certain yet.

We don't have a new momcat or kittens lined up for after the Fonts' graduation yet, but we'll be sure to let you know when we do! We plan to have the main room empty for at least a couple of days, so we can properly clean and sterilize it. During that time, we'll have extra focus on the Angel Fish. Probably shortly thereafter, we'll be ready to announce the next class!

The new mailbag segments on Saturday mornings at 10:00 KATZ have been a huge success. Thank you all so much for contributing. I hope they are as fun for you as they are for us! And the donations have been so vast in number that we've had to share some of the overflow with other fosters at OAW. Someday, perhaps, we'll even need to share with other fosters at other shelters!

We've sadly been too busy here at the Academy to produce any of our special videos - and of course, a contributing factor is the continued absence of our best camera. We hope to be able to make some soon! Also, we're constantly a little behind in responding to e-mail, but we love hearing from you. We'll get caught up!

All right - we have a whole bunch of photos that we hadn't yet shared with you, which are at the end of this post. But first! The "Kitten Academy Fans" on Twitter have put together a yearbook for us, which is really wonderful, and must be seen! The photos are below, after the Yearbook.

That is amazing! Thanks to Ellie and Bates! And thanks for letting us share it here!

Here's the promised photos!

Charwee's Adventures Continue!

March 07, 2017 by DJ in Adoption, Graduation

Just a quick update regarding the next stop on Charlie's adventures! Charlie is going to be picked up by his adopter tomorrow, the 8th, at roughly 11:00 KATZ. We will archive the stream for those of you who want to see it but can't tune in live.

Charlie will be taking his favorite blue ball, his 'space age bachelor pad,' and a bag full of goodies that you all have donated. Thank you so much for your generosity!

We know we're all somewhat sad to see him go - and it's OK to be sad. But we can assure you that this is what's best for Charlie! As we were saying on the stream this morning: many people have asked us to keep Charlie. But as special as Charlie is, it's not fair to only give him 1/17th of the love we have for cats (our six cats, plus the 10 fosters we have, plus Charlie = 17)! It's much better for Charlie to go to a home where he can have the lion's share of the love, as he deserves. On top of that, his adopters have promised to keep us up to date with a constant stream of news and photos. So it's not 'goodbye' - it's just 'see you later!'

We can also tell you that Charlie's adopters are wonderful people, and we're certain you'll agree. We can't say more today, but after the adoption we'll be able to tell you more about them. You're going to be thrilled for little Charwee!

Here's some of the most recent photos of Charlie.

Sarah Donner and Other Mews!

March 01, 2017 by Mr. Academy

Firstly - if you're here for news and photos of the newborn kittens, that's all in our previous post -- click here!

The big news this week is that we're planning to have our first celebrity guest at the Kitten Academy! The marvelous and talented Sarah Donner, who is a kitten foster, musician, and artist, will be visiting on Friday the 3rd! We're planning on seeing her around or after 13:00 KATZ (that's Kitten Academy Time Zone!) but because she has such a very long way to travel, please don't consider that an exact time!

You owe it to yourself to dig around her website and see all the super-creative kitten-related (and otherwise!) work she's done. While she is here, she plans to bring out her Ukulele and play a few songs to The Fonts and Charlie! It should be a good time for all!

Now for the rest of the news and housekeeping:

We still haven't caught up with the influx of e-mails that resulted from Angel's delivery of four healthy kittens, and our appearance on BBC Trending. We apologize! We hope to get completely up-to-date in the next day or so. In the meantime, rest assured that we probably did read your messages, and just haven't had the time to properly respond!

Charlie's back from his neuter and feeling fine! His adopter will be coming to take him to his new home on the 8th. We've been promised lots of pictures and stories to share with you all - so don't think of it as "goodbye" -- just "see you later!"

Also on Friday, we expect a visit from some potential Font adopters! We're not sure how they'll feel about being on camera - so we'll leave that up to them. Perhaps we'll have two guest appearances on the same day!

We feel that the advertising trial run that we ran was probably a success. The numbers seem to make it worthwhile to continue running advertisements - but the numbers are far from final. Not only do they still fluctuate from day to day, but YouTube's 'estimated' numbers haven't yet rolled over to AdSense or actual payments, so it's hard to know if they're accurate. We expect that to happen by the 15th.

If YouTube's numbers are accurate, then there's more coming in from views by YouTube Red users than there are from advertisements! We'd highly encourage you to sign up if it's available in your country. The best way -- the way we do -- is to sign up for Google Play Music, which is a wonderful service, and includes YouTube Red as a perk. If you have YouTube Red, you get access to extra exclusive content (not from us - but from other YouTubers) and music videos, but best of all, you never see an advertisement on YouTube!

We'll be sure to give you a more full update on the advertising after we've seen the process work from end-to-end, later this month!

Thank you all so much for your support, for watching, and for participating in Kitten Academy! Here's the photos from the "action" shoot from the 25th.

Introducing Angel's Fish!

February 27, 2017 by DJ

After a lot of patient waiting on the part of Kitten Academy faculty, staff, and fans, Angel gave birth to four beautiful and healthy kittens! The delivery started around 1:45 PM on Sunday, the 26th of February. We expected some complications when her first kitten arrived paw-first but everything went smoothly. The kittens have been quick to nurse and even purr! They are doing exceedingly well and we have great hopes for them in the coming weeks at the Academy.

We apologize for the quality of the following photos - Angel's a little bit of a nervous mom and we don't want to disturb her more than necessary in these first days.

With no further ado, here are the kittens with their names! They are "Angel's Fish" and they are listed below in the order of their birth.

In case you missed the live births or just want to review, here is a link to the archived footage of Angel giving birth. The video description contains clickable links to the time of each birth - the first one is about an hour and twenty minutes into the video.

If you would like to see a quick video of the kittens up close on their first night at the Academy, click here.

As usual, here's a collection of the rest of the photos. WARNING: A few of these from during the birth may be a little much for the squeamish viewer!

Introducing Angel!

February 18, 2017 by Mr. Academy

This is just a quick post to officially introduce Angel, the new pregnant cat you may have already noticed in the Kitten Academy Annex! She's a beautiful Calico, who was brought to us by On Angels' Wings. She's already proven herself to be friendly, and likes to purr, and follow us around the room. She also comes running at the sound of an opening tin of food!

It's difficult to predict exactly when she will deliver her kittens, but DJ thinks it will be in the next day. Mr. A. thinks it'll certainly be sometime this week. We can already feel her little kittens kicking if we put a hand on her belly; they're excited to get out!

Although we haven't been keeping the Annex camera on consistently, the plan is to live stream the birth. We put the camera on the stream whenever we're not watching her directly, so we can hear if anything happens! Sorry if that makes it a little boring sometimes. Things can get a little intense when a cat goes into labor, but if possible, we'll tweet when it begins, take some supplemental recordings, and archive the footage from the live stream, just like we did for Ivy.

Here's some photos we got over the first couple days she's been here!

One extra quick note - Chiffon was adopted, which means all the Textiles have homes, except for Velvet! She's still at On Angels' Wings.

Mews You May Have Heard!

February 11, 2017 by Mr. Academy

Flannel wants to talk to you about adopting all her sisters.

Hello, Kitten Academicians! Just a quick post to make sure everyone's aware of a few random bits of news that we've already announced on the live stream!

First an apology: We don't have any new photos to put on this post, because on Monday, Custard knocked our best camera off a desk, and now it's been sent in for repairs. It'll be out for a few weeks. Until then, we'll fall back on the older camera and our cell phones!

The Textiles are all going to be at an event with On Angels' Wings, in Crystal Lake, at the Crystal Lake PetCo today. After the event, they will go to the On Angels' Wings store, where they will stay until Sunday evening - or until adopted, whichever comes first! Any Textiles not adopted by Sunday will return to the Academy, where they will have free run of the house most of the time, rather than returning to the main Academy room.

Acro is preparing to drop his new album soon.

The Fonts will be moved into the main Academy room this weekend, after we give it a thorough cleaning. We're all looking forward to how they will react to being able to see more of the world!

Our test runs of YouTube's new live-streaming-from-a-phone feature were, we feel, highly successful! Thanks to those of you who managed to join us, even though we didn't really plan or announce them. Expect us to do more of that now that it's an option!

We met with a lawyer this week, and have started down the path to turning Kitten Academy into a real 501c3 charity. It'll take a while to get it all done, but we expect it to bring a lot of benefits to you, and to us! More news as that develops.

Charlie taking lessons from Professor Custard.

Finally, this week, from Sunday the 12th - Sunday the 19th (roughly) we will be running a trial of "monetization" on YouTube. That's what they call it when we have ads play on and around our videos. We don't get any control over what ads you see, but we do get a certain amount of control over where and when they might appear. We'll be using the week to figure out those controls, what the options are, and also to get a feel for whether it's worthwhile at all. Some of you may recall we did a brief trial last year and decided against it - we think it's time to try it again and see if anything's changed. If you really can't stand advertisements, we apologize - and keep in mind that YouTube Red eliminates all ads on YouTube!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

Textiles Graduation!

January 29, 2017 by Mr. Academy

These kids sure grew up quickly! They arrived December 23rd, and here we are, a month later, ready to send them off! They will go for their "graduation ceremony" (spay/neuter, microchipping, and vaccines) on Thursday the 2nd, then be fully ready to adopt this weekend. February 4th. If you're interested in one or more of these lovable, rambunctious Textiles, contact On Angels' Wings in Crystal Lake, IL to put in an application. It's not too soon to do it now! You can find the standard application on their website here.

Before we get to the photos, one quick thing I forgot to mention in the last post. We hit 150,000 YouTube subscribers over the weekend! WOW! Thank you all so much!

Velvet did a wonderful job of raising her kids. A true provider, she was often seen at night calling them to join her after a successful hunt for a catnip mouse. She loves food more than anything else in the world. She can be affectionate and enjoy purring in a lap, but mainly on her own terms. She would never hurt a person, but isn't shy about letting you know when she's had enough. She tolerates the presence of other cats and even dogs, though she's not interested in making new friends.

Tweed - affectionately called "Tweedybear" has proven that he can hold his own against his five sisters. Playful and independent, but loves nothing more than a good nap on a soft bed. He has a wonderfully affectionate personality and is ready with purrs when picked up! He has grown up in a high-energy family and would do fantastically well whether adopted by himself or along with one of his adorable sisters.

Merino is the boldest of the Textiles, and a true people-lover. She loves to explore, will sneak out of the Kitten Academy at any opportunity to see the world. She gets excited whenever people are around and sometimes will climb a leg to get attention. While she is always full of purrs for her people, a lot of her adventures at the Kitten Academy have been accomplished with help from Tweed, Poplin and Flannel. If you are looking to adopt more than one kitten, you cannot go wrong with Merino along with one of her siblings!

Poplin is a beautiful black kitten with distinctive white eyeliner! Just like her siblings, she is always ready for adventure and has a lot of love for her humans. She has been the leader as well as trusty team member of many exploratory missions undertaken by the Textiles at the Kitten Academy. After a long day of kitten-work, she is also often found right in the middle of cuddle-piles with her siblings. Poplin would make a wonderful pet for anyone looking to adopt just her or along with one of her siblings.

Flannel - Female - Black/Yellow Plaid Collar

Flannel enjoys people and can form a tight bond with the right human. She is a very inquisitive kitten and makes friends with other animals fairly quickly. She also has a lot of snuggles for her humans. She loves to settle in for a nap on your shoulder. She has spent a lot of time in rough-n-tumble mode with her tireless siblings. Flannel will make a great pet whether adopted by herself or with one of her sisters for company!

Chiffon is the most independent of the Textiles, and would be ideal for someone who wants a cat that can do her own thing more often than not. She appreciates attention and playtime with her siblings. She always has purrs and snuggles for her humans, especially when it's nap time. She may be ideal to be adopted with one of her siblings so both kittens get the amount of play and activity that matches up with their incredible energy levels.

Jacquard - Female - Pink Tiger Stripe Collar

Jackie is as playful and energetic as any of the Textiles. She loves to attack socks... especially with feet in them! She is often found practicing her wrestling moves on one of her siblings but is also very affectionate when it comes to time with her humans. She loves snuggling up with her siblings at nap-time and would do really well to be adopted with one of them.

As usual, here's the rest of the photos from the shoot!