sharptoothsnail

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How to Retain Your Humanity in The Darkest Timeline

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Werewolf lovers please tell me you know Prayer For Werewolves by Stephanie Burt

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What's the Point of Drawing Unicorns When the World is On Fire?

We’re coming up on five years since we had to hunker down “for two weeks” and let this novel coronavirus thing burn itself out, remember that?I am not about to start waxing nostalgic about 2020. I didn’t need a global pandemic in which we lost tens of millions of people worldwide to teach me that we need art to survive. That has been in my bones since I could hold a crayon. An article I was…

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Sharptooth Snail Gets a Makeover

It has been a long time since I’ve given the shop a good, long look, but this has been on my mind for quite some time. When I delivered my course on Print on Demand this summer for the second time, I had some very big plans to do an overhaul to go along with it, and document my process so my students could learn from it as well. Things got very busy, and I hit some health issues that made it…

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The 2025 Superb Owl

While accounts of the Game not authorized by the NFL are strictly prohibited, I will say that I enjoyed having this one on in the background this year, especially since I am always rooting for the Birds, no matter what, so this didn’t disappoint. More and more people are getting into the spirit of the Superb Owl every year, including conservation groups and natural history museums, and even…

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I Went to Japan and Ate EVERYTHING (except natto)

I Went to Japan and Ate EVERYTHING (except natto)

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does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

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The Wailing Wraith and the Sacred Spring

The Wailing Wraith and the Sacred Spring

A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Garrett reached out and asked if I wanted to work with him on a cover design for a game jam he was entering. Garrett and I have been playing make-believe since we were six years old, and we still play tabletop RPGs when our schedules allow, so we did everything we could to make this work, and here it is! Knave is a is a rules toolkit for running old school fantasy…

[sharptoothsnail]

The Wailing Wraith and the Sacred Spring

A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Garrett reached out and asked if I wanted to work with him on a cover design for a game jam he was entering. Garrett and I have been playing make-believe since we were six years old, and we still play tabletop RPGs when our schedules allow, so we did everything we could to make this work, and here it is! Knave is a is a rules toolkit for running old school fantasy…

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The Fear and Paradoxes of Focusing on Personal Work

I have had a catastrophic series of anchor clients reducing their contracts all at once recently. There are no two ways about it— I’m in trouble. I have some hourly work trickling in, and I’m in a position where I won’t be out on the street right away if I miss rent, but times, as they say, are hard. On the other hand, I have more time that I can spend working on the shop, which is long overdue…

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Zoozve, my beloved

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Take a break, this cute tardigrade needs time to cross your dash:

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Y'all know I'm a sucker for endangered species reintroduction stories, right? Especially when it's not a charismatic megafauna being highlighted. So of course I was excited when this headline crossed my dash.

The magnificent ramshorn (what a great name!), also known as Planorbella magnifica, is a tiny snail endemic to ponds and other quiet waterways in North Carolina's lower Cape Fear River basin. In fact, they were only known from four sites in the region. Due to plummeting numbers in its limited habitat, some of the last of these snails were removed from the wild to create an intensive captive breeding program. (It really doesn't take much to keep a snail happy in captivity once you figure out what conditions it needs.) The last wild individual was observed twenty years ago, and it is considered to be extinct in the wild.

That is, until now. Two thousand of these little reddish snails were released into a safe pond in Brunswick County. Researchers are using this as a way to observe how well these captive-bred snails adapt to their historic habitat, including successful reproduction. If all goes well, we can hope to see more reintroductions of these native mollusks back into their original range.

We nature nerds are biased, because we think everything in nature is awesome (yes, I'm even an apologist for mosquitoes!) So of course we get excited when a bunch of rare little snails get a second chance, because we understand how crucial each species is to its ecosystem. It can be tougher sometimes to sell the importance of this to the general public, who may question why it would be such a big deal for one snail species to go extinct. That's why I think it's so important for us to keep sharing our knowledge and--perhaps even more importantly--our enthusiasm for all these amazing beings. Keep being cheerleaders for critters like these snails, and your enthusiasm may end up being contagious!

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i don't like to yuck people's yum but i have to say that my least favorite thing to come from the current state of Artists on the Internet is the idea of a sketchbook as something nice and pretty and shareable. like i love me a notebook full of gorgeous art don't get me wrong but that is NOT what a sketchbook is. a sketchbook is my friend who i carry around everywhere like a purse chihuahua. it is the physical manifestation of my notes app. it is the container into which i wring my brain out. it is my therapist. and most of all it is filled with absolutely terrible sketches that should never see the light of day.

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Tardigrade corn maze at Treinen Farm in Wisconsin.

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I hate that I’m always trying to find cool biology themed stuff to wear but all the “nature inspired” clothing companies just have like two crossed arrows or a minimalistic mountain on a sweatshirt. Fucking lame, that’s barely even nature-adjacent. Put the life cycle of a salamander on a jacket, put hyena skeleton patterns on leggings, put a damn field guide of birds of prey on a peacoat and THEN you can have my money. Do NOT give me a shirt with a leaf on it that says “stay wild” or some bullshit I would much prefer clothing that broadcasts to everyone around me how many teeth an adult Jaguar has or how some pitcher plants can catch and digest rats.