Insect Picture of the Day

So, the good news is, I managed to get the NEW new laptop set up this weekend. The bad news is that I needed to get a NEW new laptop when the old one had trouble right after being repaired. My work bought me a new one (yay for working at awesome companies) and I’m going to get the old one repaired (again) and then sell it.

I’ve spent the weeking fighting with laptop setup stuff. Rather than late-post a crappy Saturday and Sunday, I’ll concentrate on getting a decent post out to you all for tomorrow. It will be late, but should be up by noon.

Apologies for the spotty schedule. I shall have a talk with the slave drivers tomorrow and see about getting them better whips.

(This October, InsectPOD is celebrating with a special “creepy story”, the Hopper Case Files, told in installments. New readers should start with the first case file, The Missing Mayfly.)

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Hopper made it out of the web, and was given an award by the mayor for ridding it of not one but two mob bosses. He currently works as a freelance private investigator.

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Doris Mactans is serving 17 consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison.

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With the death of both Anarcha and Arga, Karen Stalk’s testimony to help bring them down on racketeering charges was no longer necessary. She was reunited with her husband and together they have several hundred offspring, with thousands of grandchildren on the way.

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Lyle the Doorman sold his story of Black Widow Doris to the tabloids and made millions. He has postponed his metamorphosis indefinitely in order to pursue a career in acting.

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Arga “Threeface” Trifasciata is dead, eaten by a magpie. However, had she eaten Hopper as I had originally planned for this story, this would have been her mugshot as she was finally brought down on racketeering and tax evasion.

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After escaping from the web, Hopper went back to Anarcha’s web with a couple of Nicrophorus beetles to retrieve the body of Viridiana G. Mantis and give it a decent burial. Anarcha’s body was still there, but Viridiana’s was gone. Hopper decided that the magpie must have eaten her, too, but everybody knows that magpies only eat living bugs….

Hi Gang,

Writing the Hopper Case Files was way harder than I thought it would be, not least because my laptop blew up on Friday. I have one last post to write in it, an epilogue to the story, which I will put up tonight.

Regular InsectPOD programming will resume tomorrow morning at the usual scheduled time.

Thanks!

David

I just got a strange text-to-landline message from David, and from what I can tell it was asking me to post a news post telling everybody that he was up all night working on finishing Hopper’s story, but then his laptop exploded.

I don’t think he means literally.

Sorry I don’t have any more info, but I’m sure David is doing all that he can to make sure Hopper’s story gets through to us all.  I’m just as excited as everyone else to see how it ends!

Oops! I had Jeremiah’s post queued up a month ago, before we decided to tell this crazy story with Hopper.

I’ll fix the story tonight. Check back around 9pm MST. 9pm has come and gone, and I am still stuck at work. One of the advantages of working at a job where you only get to sleep when the Internet is happy. I will write the post as soon as I get free to come home.

UPDATE: I got done at work at 1:30am, and have to go back in at 6am. My apologies ofr not hving this done in adance so it wouldn’t disrupt the story. I will update the story for today and tomorrow as soon as I am able. Check back thorughout the day, hopefully I’ll get time to do it before evening.

Thank you all for the well-wishes; and again I apologize. The finale is coming. I promise!

You know that big surprise Jeremiah Fargo and I have been working on for October? Well, here it is. We’re excited (and a little panicked, because there’s still a couple of plot holes we haven’t filled!) to bring you “G.R. Hopper Case Files”.

They’ll be running all month, as part of the “Scary October” package.

I should warn you arachnophobes in advance, spiders may appear without warning on any day of the week during October. There’s quite a few of them, in fact.

Happy Halloween, in 30 more days!

Jeremiah Fargo and I are cooking up something special for October, and he has graciously agreed to handle the daily posts this week so I can finish it up. Thanks, Jeremiah!

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Parkway sends in this fascinating photo of bee-after-bee action. He says that the mason bees are long gone–I assume that’s the clay packed into the ends–but that the leafcutter bees are still in full swing. That bee in the middle looks awesome as she goes smoosha smoosha smoosha trying to get that leaf to stay put.

Bonus photo: here’s a bee just getting started. I assume she’s laying eggs in there, or perhaps waiting for a photographer to get too close.

Hi Gang,

I upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress yesterday. Things mostly went smoothly, but there were a few hiccups along the way–I accidentally trashed the database at one point and had to restore from backup. This caused the site to lose 2 new users (I have emailed them), one comment (which I am still trying to restore), and the original version of this news post.

The biggest change you will notice is that I have tightened up the comment restrictions. You now must be logged in in order to post. Registration is free, so hopefully that won’t be too tedious. I understand that this raises the hassle level, however, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

The reason I did this is that InsectPOD is squarely in the sights of several automated spam farms. The site gets several dozen spam posts per day now. Most of these get caught and filtered automatically, but about twice a month one gets through. By requiring registration, hopefully this will cut down on the spam traffic.

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience. If this is a problem for you, please email me at the usual address. Also, please feel free to contact me if you notice any problems with the new version of the site.

Thanks!

Hi Gang,

So I thought I had the backlog all caught up tonight, but then I realized I had a bunch of unreplied emails from back in June. I started scrolling back and counting… just over a hundred unanswered emails.

So, this is gonna take longer than I thought. Probably only another week or so, though… I think of those hundred about 60 are ones I have already processed and just need to  dash off a thank-you note for.

As always, you can follow my buffer status and insect-blogging progress on Twitter.

Cheers!