Just imagine if you’d read my Contingent article but instead of looking at a picture of a cute bumblebee it was a huge grasshopper with spikes on every single one of its feet and “bite your finger” shaped mandibles

Big-Bee is officially ended, and I’m playfully apprehensive to reveal my new digitization project. These guys are not so… charismatic as the bees that made such good spokesinsects for conservation and museum collections

Finally updated my website. Most notable: two new FUTURES articles for Starset and my Contingent article are live on the non-fiction page. Unfortunately I somehow managed to make my footer tremendously long and Wix won’t let me shrink it. So ignore that ajhspinner.wixsite.com/aliyaspinner...

Happy to have made the cut!… a month belated. I’ve been really humbled by the positive reception to my Contingent piece about the entomology collections and my work, which can seem so small and yet has such a big impact.

“Our natural history is held in these archives, a history which can only be discovered thru support for both the collection & its stewards.”- @cladist-magpie.bsky.social Tens of millions of dollars in NSF grants have been slashed: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/02/1...

For the next entry in our Losses series, A’liya Spinner takes us into an NSF-funded project threatened by government cuts. "These ambassadors for entomology have already taught us so much about evolution, phylogeny, and climate change by acting as miniature windows into natural history."

If I were disgustingly wealthy I would spend it all patroning the arts like God intended and my first commission would be a full-cast re-recording of the Hunchback of Notre Dame musical that 1) replaces all the g-slurs with Roma & Romani 2) adds a Rest & Recreation reprise

Bestie/boyf/I finally finished Saws 1-9 in preparation for Saw X/to get cultured. Here’s every Jigsaw killer AS I REMEMBER THEM: 1. John Kramer 2. John + Amanda 3. J & A (RIP) 4. Copguy Hoffman 5. Hoffman again??? 6. Lady Kramer vs Hoffman 7. Cary Elwes 8. White guy (best one) 9. Skank

The bestie and boyf and I are participating today in the extraordinarily popular cultural phenomenon Helicoprion* in which we watch Jaws and Spiral: From the Book of Saw back to back * Helicoprion is a genus of extinct shark known for its spiral-shaped “whorl” tooth

Unstoppable Force (me holding up the entire line checking every pocket for my mCard so I can get on the bus) versus an Immovable Object (a very polite construction worker who refuses to get on the bus before me for chivalry reasons)

Being zoology’s longest-working lab tech definitely has its upsides (researchers chat with me, I’ve had some post-grant job offers, the illusion of superiority, etc) but I know I am ultimately only the mini-boss. The entomologist’s goon. I can never match the chaotic stage presence that my boss has.

Telling my boss (an entomologist) that the reason I don’t like to swim outdoors is because I accidentally swallowed a dead centipede in an outdoor pool when I was like, 11, and his response is “was it delish?”

Reading a paleontologist’s response to another paleontologist who wrote a book criticizing *his* book and it includes several hilarious moments and THIS banger: “The way [he] goes about biting the hand that once fed him would make a shoal of piranha seem decorous.”

Sketched three of my novel characters as “Esmeralda und Phoebus von Claude Frollo ueberrascht” by Auguste Couder (1837) during a Deadlands session last night. Those familiar with the novel know that I’ve designated the entire Hunchback of Notre Dame musical as its soundtrack.

I don’t necessarily REGRET chickening out of making my senior quote “God is a cladist and I am a fish”, but I do sort of wish I could’ve seen if the yearbook committee tried to stop me on that one.

Anybody know any good Blue Sky drama I can lurk? My Twitter feed is like 60% asoiaf Blacks vs. Greens discourse (team Black forever btw I genuinely think Green stans just hate women) but I can’t seem to find that energy here. Please help— I love lurking discourse instead of working on my novel

The latest of my nonfiction work is LIVE with The Long Now Foundation. In three vignettes, I imagine the life & afterlife of a Xylocopa fimbriata. How do you archive something that predates you and will outlive you, too? With love— with respect, with a perspective that spans for centuries.