I make weird niche furry art of the bug variety!🐝🪲🕷️🦂🪰
If you want to commission me to draw your weird niche characters, you can find my commission sheet below:
(Don't be afraid to ask for things that aren't bugs btw. I'm very flexible!)
In order to weed out the bots I've decided not to take commissions through DMs. If you want to commission me you can fill out my form here.
If you don't want/can't get a commission, but you still want to support me, you can donate to my Kofi here.
Lately I've been working on a comic called Cibarium: Sixth City, which is a detective story starring queer bugs in a neon biopunk setting (with some light spec bio elements). If you want to know more about it, check out the Cibarium tag at the bottom of this post!
Hello person having transgender thoughts but convinced they aren't trans because they don't have the requisite amount of dysphoria they think they need
Hi I transitioned without even thinking I had dysphoria. Like later in hindsight I can go "oh that's probably what it was" but for the first year of my transition I was straight up like "I like being a guy but I like being a girl WAY more" and you can do that!! There is no prerequisite amount of suffering needed to make yourself happier.
That poor pest control guy did not know what he was getting into, but given the state of my yard i feel like he should have known what he was getting into.
He was going door to door offering to spray the base of the house for pests for a discount rate because one of our neighbors signed up for pest control and he walked down my driveway (covered in spiderwebs), up onto my front porch (covered in spiderwebs), and knocked on my door (covered in spiderwebs) and said "hi, I'm John from the bug company, would you be interested in a discount service because it seems like you may have a spider problem."
And I said, "oh, no, I'm sorry, I won't be spraying for spiders, I like them. I want to encourage them."
And he gave me kind of a weird look and was like "why?" And I was honest and said that they were my pest control, they take care of my mosquitoes and and and flies, and then I kind of laughed and said that I should stop because I know way too much about spiders and if he let me go I'd talk his ear off.
And then he made his fatal mistake and asked what I knew about spiders, and if I knew what kinds of webs he'd walked past to get on the porch and what spiders were in my yard.
So then he got to hear my thoughts on brown vs black widows and why I wished there were as many black widows as there used to be but I had a big beautiful one under my patio table right now and even if I prefer black widows because they aren't invasive the same way that brown widows are i still like the brown widows and i had a lovely one who lived in my patio chair from August until the firestorm in January and she was so good and kept eating cockroaches and had made five big egg sacks and how I was so proud of her and I used to have a lot more orb weavers but their numbers never recovered after the tropical storm last year but I had a cute one on the shed that I took a picture of yesterday and of course there are tons of wolf spiders and jumping spiders and cellar spiders if you wanted to count them too and some false widows but I hadn't seen any of them this year and, well, yeah, anyway they're not actually dangerous mostly and widows want nothing to do with you but a bite wasn't pleasant but much better than a recluse bite but I almost never see recluses around here but i wouldn't, would I, because they're not called brown gregarious spiders, oh and there are black footed yellow sack spiders around and you don't want those to bite you but their little toes are so cute and I'm sorry, sorry, sorry like I said I can go off about spiders, but also I don't want to spray because I've got so many pollinators, I've got a whole wisteria vine full of carpenter bees, actually i saw a male valley carpenter bee last week, did you know they're golden and fuzzy? He was so cool! But, yes, sorry, I won't be spraying but thank you for asking, and I'm sorry I was the crazy spider lady at you!
I had almost this exact conversation with the door-to-door pest control guy last summer, but about the wasps. He was outright confused when I told him that not only was he not welcome in my yard, I'd just put out some fried chicken crumbs for my paper wasps to make sure they built their hives on my property because nothing in his truck made better crop pest control than a hungry nest of Red Paper Wasps, except maybe Ichneumons but have to get rid of the lawn before those will move in-
"Red Paper wasps? Those are very dangerous! They're very aggressive!" he sputters.
"Really? They seem to be quite placid." I indicated the Fine-backed Red Paper Wasp nest about 16 inches above his head under the eaves.
He stared.
I picked up a crumb of KFC from the porch shelf with my finger and held it up. One of the ladies investigated, then landed and sat on my finger and munched happily for a few seconds before returning to the nest.
"Would you like to see the common paper wasps? They've got a great nest going on the side of the garage."
look it isn't that hard you increase the amount of buses and make dedicated bus lanes on roads and MAKE THE BUSES FREE and the bus lanes can be converted into tram lines because they're already exclusive to transit AND YOU BUILD AND MAINTAIN RAIL BETWEEN TOWNS IT ISN'T HARD IT ISN'T HARD IT ISN'T HARD IT ISN'T HARD
National Public Data is back online. Protect your privacy from it now - and check if other people-search sites have your information.
Over a year ago, National Public Data (NPD), a search site for people, earned a place in privacy infamy for a security breach that revealed the personal data of 3 billion individuals (that's billion with a "b"). Now, after disappearing, NPD is back.
As ZDNET sister publication PCMag reported, NPD is open for snooping again under a new owner, the rather mysterious-sounding Perfect Privacy LLC.
Oh boy. Better head over to nationalpublicdata.com and see if your profile is there. Then follow the handy instructions in the ZDNET article to have yourself removed:
How to remove your information from NPD
Search your name on nationalpublicdata.com.
When you find your profile, click "View Full Profile."
Copy its URL.
Go to nationalpublicdata.com/optout.html.
Drop the URL into the "Your Profile Link" field and click "Request Removal."
Enter an email address, and the site will send you an email requesting that you click to confirm deletion.
You'll need a separate email address for each profile you want to delete.
As the OP mentioned, if you find multiple profiles that match your information, be aware that they won't let you use the same email for the confirmation step to delete both.
Also, I wouldn't trust this company with a regularly used email address (I suspect they would just love to confirm they had the right address or to discover your alternate email accounts if they didn't have it already). Instead, I suggest creating email aliases or multiple throwaway email accounts just for this use.
Man I can't believe I unlocked how to enjoy drawing again after I struggled with that for over a decade.
Things I wish I realized sooner:
-you can literally just draw shit for fun without trying to be good
-yes even if you're putting it online or otherwise showing it to other people
-there is literally no reason to struggle with human anatomy if it's not fun, and you're doing this shit for fun, and you have no interest in drawing humans. This applies to everything formal art instruction focuses on
-doing the shit everyone says is a good exercise like drawing from life, trying drawing at different scales, etc, is way easier to do with stuff you actually find fun to draw
Huge thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about iDigBio's chatbot, or who participated in the webinar (even though they locked the chat, so there wasn't much we could do). I really do appreciate everything, sincerely. This same group is going to be tabling their new sludge machine at ECN this fall, and I'll be there to ask the same questions they refused to answer today. Hope to see some of you there, too.
A few weeks ago iNaturalist, a major online biodiversity social network/forum and database, announced it had received money from Google to create a generative AI tool for the purpose of adding "natural language" explanations to user-submitted content. No one asked for this, almost no one wanted this, people were already happily doing this sort of thing for free, and backlash was immediate: https://www.reddit.com/r/iNaturalist/comments/1l85g47/inaturalist_is_partnering_with_google_generative/
iDigBio is (was?) an NSF-funded online database, which brings together museum collection material from around the world for easy viewing in one place.
iDigBio is introducing a new "agentic" LLM chatbot called "iChatBio" to their website (which already has a search bar) in order to allow for "integrated searches across several databases simultaneously" with "a single, customized plain-language query". This is something entirely possible with the current state of the website right now, and something I do for my research almost every day. Again, the website has a search bar, and by definition it is already linking multiple sources of information together, because that's what a database is. AT BEST, assuming it works with 100% accuracy, they have re-invented the search bar but made it cost more energy. It is truly that lame.
Hopefully I can go on without explaining why generative AI should not be ANYWHERE near biology. Even if these tools did not plagiarize from real people and occasionally just make things up, they are more environmentally costly than existing alternatives, which undermines the supposed goal of these sites in the first place: to document and protect biodiversity. It's hard enough already.
I suspect iDigBio higher-ups already know how people feel about iNaturalist's recent announcement, as many people use both websites, and so they are keeping quiet about this to avoid extra scrutiny. I have received two separate iDigBio zoom webinar invitations in separate listservs within the past few days - one with just the chatbot webinar, and one with a totally different set (with some more generic stuff like "looking forward to the future!"). If the new iChatBio agentic LLM is so wonderful, then I think as many people as possible should know about it, so I am distributing the link to the chatbot webinar.
The webinar is on Monday, August 18th, from 1pm to 2pm. Here is the link to register:
Curious how AI is transforming biodiversity research? Join us for a look at iChatBio, a cutting-edge agentic system designed to help scienti
It asks for your name, email, and organization. If you don't have an official affiliation and you would still like to participate, I see nothing wrong with listing yourself as "independent organization" and "citizen scientist". The website says ET in one place and CT in another place, and I'm not sure which is true, so I will be there at 1pm ET (maybe they had the chatbot write the announcement, too).
I encourage anyone interested in biodiversity, museum collections, databases, living things, information flow, or the planet Earth in general to take a look at this if you are able, and to perhaps prepare some questions. Feel free to share this link with other biology or data listservs, or with anyone you know who may be interested.
I can't imagine what people at iDigBio are thinking. If I had to guess, I truly think they want this announcement over and buried quickly, so they can pretend everyone is fine with it and collect the money. I am not fine with it.
Wanted to wait a bit before posting the whole (SFW) portions but uncertain how long the entire comic will be available. Get it before mastercard screws us over! (please keep in mind the links are 18+)
