Moth on the Screen

For the folks curious about templates, these are the shapes I cut from cardboard. I added a couple little pieces of cereal box cardboard as structural support in various points, like the bridge of the nose and behind the beak. Also, I ended up cutting the forehead piece a little smaller, which I marked on the paper, but I kept the template size in case you want to see how it originally looked.

It's a completely different piece of wearable art. It has a different soul. It has a different feel.

Bear's mask templates! I just want to stress that our masks are extremely low tech and budget friendly. They're made out of cardboard, hot glue, and fleece, with an elastic band in the back. I used a little sheer black fabric I had leftover from my terror bird costume for the eyes.

Fleece and felt are very forgiving fabrics and you can basically just cut a single large piece and stretch it to fit, gluing it to the cardboard one small section at a time. The fabric was the only purchase we made for these, and it was in the form of thrift store blankets.

Polish folks LARPing as Americans, some photographs of (by Maciej Margielski)

More phots here.

Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias), family Eurypygidae, order Eurypygiformes, Costa Rica

This bird is the only member of its family.

Its closest living relative is the Kagu of New Caldeonia.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020:

Big volume #FencepostOfTheWeek

Brown Skua or Subantarctic Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus), EAT A TASRT FISH!!!, family Stercorariidae, order Charadriiformes, Hout Bay, South Africa

It's Agender Pride Day, here's some personal art from me

And while it drew the attention of some unfortunate individuals (who were promptly blocked) I couldn't really regret it given the massive amounts of responses from folks who sympathize and relate to this (whether they be agender or another nonbinary identity) and a few folks who even learned something about themselves from it.

Violet-green Swallow (Tachycineta thalassina), family Hirundinidae, order Passeriformes, NM, USA