I used to be very afraid of bugs when I was little but now I’m not. I don’t know when that changed. I remember my first time seeing a house centipede in the bathroom of my first apartment. It scared the shit out of me and it was moving so fast; I thought I ought to kill it and ask questions later. Well, you probably already know what I’m going to tell you: I found out after the fact that they’re not only harmless but potentially beneficial to have in your home. I’m sure that ever since then at least I tried to learn as much as I could about the tiny arthropods around me before harming any more of them.
By the way, video games are full of bugs! Did you notice? How many Japanese game devs were influenced by the bug-catching they got up to in their youth? Something to explore while we are sharing all of our cool bugs.
Bugs are cool! I have a phobia of certain winged insects, primarily the ones that sting but not necessarily the ones that sting. But! I still think they’re cool, I just don’t want them near me.
In my area, we’re right in the middle of the season when the Eastern Lubber goes through its life cycle and swarms. I used to think they were locusts, but actually they’re giant grasshoppers!
I find them so interesting because they start out tiny, the size of a segment of a finger maybe, but in like a month they are huge, bigger than a thumb. I took a picture of a big one that had climbed itself up a wall recently. Forgive my crappy phone camera.
That looks to my untrained eye like a desert stink beetle (Eleodes)? So the cat probably knew better than to mess with it!! That snail couple is so pretty.
Ten years ago i used to sleep in another room in my house. There was a shelf above the bed. One day i woke up because some stuff from the shelf was falling in my face, i got up, turned on the lights and saw a giant thing flapping around.
Let my thread act as some sort of exposure therapy. This is a safe space to learn about bugs and get to know them better and understand why most of them are our friends!
Love this idea. And as I type this, there is literally a spider walking around in my room, who I’m chilling with, because I know the benefits she can bring.
BUT STILL. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that initial skin-rippling, piano-chord striking, exclamation mark over the head moment when a bug appears.
For a video game I once translated, I had to translate a list of over a hundred real bugs of various sorts… The issue was, with the game taking place in Japan, half of them didn’t have common names in English. I ended up:
Going with a common name for the species when one existed,
Going with a more general common name for the genus if that existed,
But even then, I had to be a bit too creative for my liking – my goal was that the player should be able to learn about every single bug by googling it – so I got the programmer to implement a second line of text where I put each bug’s scientific name.
It took a good many hours more than I expected, and in the process, I uncovered some inconsistencies online and all that jazz. For one species, I ended up reading a few species descriptions dating back to the 1850s to clear up the difference between two nigh-identical butterflies – only to get the correct scientific name in there. (I updated Wikipedia with my findings, of course.)
