An Unauthorised Fan Treatise by Lauren James

just remembered about this FANDOM MYSTERY THRILLER novel, which you should all read if you haven’t 

This is the standard winged nightjar and it has one singular stupidly big feather on each wing... if you even care.

Love this guy

That’s standard as in “pennant” or “banner”, not standard as in “normal”.

But it’s not a pennant-winged nightjar. THIS is a pennant-winged nightjar… if you even care.

can’t forget the Lyre-tailed Nightjar! there’s actually a number of these ridiculous guys, and they’re partly why caprimulgiforms are some of my favorite birds

also the Sickle-winged Nightjar, which is. come on, that’s just a weird moth

(Whispers) talk about their mouths now

ok

and if we’re going to make this onto a full-on nightjar weirdness appreciation post, I feel like I’ve got to mention their pectinate claws:

photo from here:

comb-shaped claws on the middle toe have evolved multiple times among a diverse variety of birds, found in nightjars, barn owls, herons, frigatebirds, and a few other groups. and despite looking exactly like they’re used for preening out feather parasites, they might have other uses for keeping birds clean that we haven’t yet identified:

heys......

*gets scared*

this website is so fucking easy all i have to do is post frogs

illustration by Maginel Wright Enright, c1907

Wow, so nice!

may your soul be overgrown with moss. may your veins fill with rainwater and your lungs swell with flowers.

is this a curse or blessing?? either way lay it on me boys

gimme the peat, boys, and free my soul

Oh, this fucking guy.

So apparently Andrew Blake (hereafter Andy), aka thanfiction, aka (now) CraftyCatDad, aka a whole bunch of other people over the decades, is back attempting to gain a(nother) following on social media.

Before I begin, a big thank you to @bemusedlybespectacled for identifying Andy as the author of this popular tweet thread, and spreading a community warning about him.

Unfortunately for everyone, Andy decided to post an (indirect) response. BemusedlyBespectacled and the truly incredible @theteablogger have already posted (excellent) discussions of his tweet thread. But his thread really pissed me off, and so I am going to do a breakdown of the some of the manipulation tactics he is using.

Unlike some other analysis posts I’ve made, I am not going to be looking at this thread in isolation – this is not a close reading within the four corners of our document. And that’s because, to give him credit, Andy is a good manipulator. I’ll be pointing out examples of this as I go through, but one of the tactics he is using in this thread is that a lot of it sounds reasonable outside the context of his history. While the extensive documentation of Andy’s history of abuse is both an independent good and useful to help warn people, the sheer amount of material can also make it difficult for a casual newcomer to know where to begin. This is particularly important when people point out behavior on Andy’s part that seems fine on the surface, but in context is part of a long history of a pattern of abusive and manipulative behavior.

This is an excellent deep-dive into Andy's thread in response to @bemusedlybespectacled's warning post about him. A+ analysis.

I do want to add one thing. I've been sitting on this for a while, and because OP brought up Andy's Twitter tagline, "Just a Simple Artificer", I feel like it's time to address it. This is a reference to the character Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (incidentally one of my top three favorite fictional characters of all time, from one of my favorite canons; everyone should check it out). The most brief and spoiler-free explanation I can give is that Garak has a dark and complicated past, and complex and evolving motives and allegiances in the present. He likes to refer to himself as "a simple tailor" when he knows perfectly well that the people he's talking to are aware that he's much more than that. Also of interest is that Garak has been exiled from his homeworld, which he loves more than anything, and it's incredibly painful to him.

I can't pretend to know what Andy was thinking when he made that his tagline. Maybe he just wanted to make a not-so-obvious Star Trek reference, but I'm inclined to think there's more to it, intentional or not. To the world at large, he presents himself as no more than a simple costume creator--a simple man just living his life, like I said in an earlier post. But there's the implication that, like Garak, Andy has hidden depths and capabilities and a mysterious past, and that he's in exile from something he misses dearly (fandom). To anyone who knows anything about his past, all this makes the tagline pretty dark, but to the average Twitter user, it probably seems perfectly innocuous. If Andy selected his tagline deliberately because of the implications, that's some top-tier hiding in plain sight.

Long read but pretty accurate.

My annotated Dracula has informed me that when Harker said his robber steak was “in the style of the London cat’s-meat!” he was referring to “A tradition in London was the “cat’s-meat man,” a vendor who sold little bits of meat on skewers for consumption by cats”

I am overjoyed by this knowledge that there were Victorians just randomly getting lil kebabs for their CATS

I am so happy to learn this was a thing, looks like they were door to door pet food sellers.

I didn’t see any new posts about it but it is VITAL that new readers know this.

“Blossoms and snow flakes.” The log of the sun. 1906. Walter King Stone, illus. 

@phasmidhugs show us the pigeon zine!!!!

pigeon zine Imminent, to tide you over please observe THE TOME

this is a poster i made for my call to action assignment in humanities! it's a bunch of basic and easy stretches for people who sit and work at a desk all day (me)

the idea is that you'd put the poster up above ur desk and do the stretches every 30 minutes or so,, the whole routine won't take more than about 6 minutes to complete and when done regularly it can prevent wrist, shoulder, neck and back pain! :)

all these stretches can be done while sitting (although i HIGHLY recommend you stand up and move around while taking a break from working)

you can get a free digital copy of this poster here on my gumroad!

More of this thing-

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

its time for the tantrum hole