The closest known relative of insects is WEIRD! Remipedes live in marine caves (you have to cave dive) and are venomous. Their names are fun: Godzillius & Morlockia. How did insects go from a common ancestor with these guys onto land? Here's one idea (but no fossils so we don't know)! #Crustmas 🧪🦑

Yesterday a @jopabinia.bsky.social skeet about arthropod clades sent me down a rabbit hole (or lava tube?). I learned there are *venomous crustaceans* called Remipedia, first discovered in 1979. Anchialine cave systems and the stuff that lives in them: wild!

Bombay, hope you all will come out for this! There are something like 150 seats and we want to fill them all up :-)

First I thought: great metaphor, but we need a different one for India. It doesn't pack the same punch here as it does in the West, because India still uses tons of asbestos, esp in low cost housing... and then I realized: oh no. Unfortunately this metaphor will probably apply to India very well

Not sure what to make of the fact that Blaft's first translation from Marathi to English has gotten its first review in Marathi! www.loksatta.com/sampadkiya/c...

“India Street Lettering is a warm, thoughtful look at the signs that quietly shape India’s streets... part archive, part love letter and a deeply satisfying record of India’s everyday typography.” Beaming about the feature in The Nod’s roundup of curated cultural finds thenodmag.com/content/nod-...

I try to focus on posting about art and comics and not my complaints about the state of everything but GOOD GRIEF

Great to see the Rob Reiner tributes. Just want to point out that the famous quotes from the Princess Bride are William Goldman's lines, not Reiner's. Reiner made a great movie but it's weird seeing everyone credit him as though he was the author. Full credit for the Spinal Tap quotes though!

When you’re making a book, not everything you’d like to include makes the cut. I had to let many signs go while editing India Street Lettering www.blaft.com/products/ind..., and among them were ads for astrologers. To make up, I wrote my small paean to them indiastreetlettering.com/blog/sun-sig...

There are a lot of things that make me mad. Like. A long list. But fake AI videos of wild animals doing cute things that animals do in fact do, make me so unreasonably mad. Should this incite the most rage in my heart, of all the horrible things going on right now? No. But here we are.

In Tamil Nadu it goes by district and Sivakasi wins hands down

For comparison, this is more than the number of people that have died in all Indo-Pak wars and Kashmir and Bastar and all Northeastern conflicts and Gujarat riots and all Indian terrorism combined since partition

Please share & donate to help Ahmed's family survive Israel's continuing genocide, which has left Palestinians starving & homeless as winter storms flood the camps, donations have slowed a lot since the 'ceasefire':

My kid (13)'s favourite book, now and since he was 9 or so. Pretty brilliant--the writer was clearly "pervaded by the Orm". The story involves all kinds of anagrams and references to English literature, and someday I need to check out the German version to try to figure out what all went down.

Heard someone say Chennai was an up & coming centre for creative branding agencies

We offer free shipping within India! And we ship internationally! We have ebooks! We have anti-caste speculative fiction! We have stories from Tamil & Gujarati pulp magazines in translation! We have a ghost encyclopedia! We have an extradimensional hybrid goat-rat entity! www.blaft.com

i wrote a minibook called How to Love Mathematical Objects. just as many people write about The Other without knowing shit about The Other, i have written this minibook about mathematics without knowing shit about mathematics. i am the colonial white dude of mathematics

Autotranslation will never replace human translation for serious or literary work, but a thing I enjoy doing with linguistics-geek friends is having a text conversation where every line is in a different language

I watched part of the recent BBC Oceans yesterday. A few of the shots looked very genAI. I looked it up: BBC has sort of hedged, saying footage is "overwhelmingly" real but not denying AI use. I really hate that I can't trust prestige nature documentaries to be actually documenting nature anymore

I am brimming with holiday spirit

We've got some book events coming up for THE SEEKERS--Dec 14 at Mehrab Bookshop in Ernakulum and Dec 18 at Literati in Goa! Come meet Gautamiputra Kamble and Sirus J Libeiro and dive into some anti-caste historico-philosophical hopepunk

India has been a testing ground for this kind of shit... it's been rampant in children's book sections around the country for a while now. This includes science and history books for older kids full of hallucinated "facts"

I have to admit, running a business like Iron Circus isn't easy, never HAS been easy, but lol it's so fucking rewarding. It actually does my soul such good. Knowing for a fact I am doing my part to provide the world with genuinely Weird Shit it needs. Anyway, off to the ICC offices on a Saturday. 🙃

Everytime I get orders of Gujarati Pulp Fiction from the US or UK it is kind of bittersweet -- I'm happy that the book is travelling so far but sad that it's not available in a single bookshop in the state of Gujarat! Gujarat, why don't you have any indie bookstorez?? www.blaft.com/products/the...

RIP Steve Cropper 🎸

The people working on this project seem extremely cool. Sifiso Mzobe, the isiZulu translator, writes great crime fiction. Zukiswa Wanner, the Shona translator, was on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and spent time in Israeli custody -- super brave! Support support support

We have events for THE SEEKERS lined up! Gautamiputra Kamble & Sirus J Libeiro will be at Mehrab in Kochi 14/12, Dogears in Goa 19/12, and the NCPA in Mumbai 2/1. More details soon! www.blaft.com/products/the...

Doing this thing in Bengaluru next Saturday, Dec 6. Some of our favourite writers and comics people are going to come. Do join! Flyer by DeadTheDuck!

As we inch ever closer to making the INDIA STREET LETTERING book www.blaft.com/products/ind... a beautiful object everyone can hold and flip through, I’m so darn happy to see a sneak peek being featured in the one and only @creativeboom.com 👉🏼 www.creativeboom.com/resources/wh.... @blaft.bsky.social

Yikes the Sri Lanka / Ditwah news is grim

We normally have vandis going up & down our street w/ loudspeakers announcing cheap onions, brooms, paper/metal recycling... and of course the kuppavandi song... but today there's one blasting a sad violin rendition of Pachelbel's canon all over the neighbourhood in breaks between cyclone rain!?

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you have seen in the wild: Whale shark Indian feather star Furry sea hare Yellow-bellied sea snake Slate-pencil urchin

Eeeee our book is on a list with Oyinkan Braithwaite how cool is that

Thank you to everyone who's shared & donated for your generosity. But support has fallen a lot. Please help Archita reach her goal and get some semblance of security in this terrible time for her and her mother. I'm the only one who's donated in 3 days:

Alabama's gotten me so upset inthesetimes.com/article/alab...

have you ever wanted to read and listen along to a disappointing story about revolting worms? you're in luck! strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Stopping this from happening (in addition to, y'know, just colonialism in general) is one of those things for which I'd use a wish to change history

'testing the ceasefire' is a locution the AP should be ashamed of.

one in five americans still getting their brains poached in elon's racist, self-worshipping bullshit

The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF gets a shout-out at the end! "both marker and manifesto"

Have we discovered the cuddliest, or are they still out there…waiting? 🥺

all day every day tbh

Do you ever find yourself thinking about Phylum Arthropoda and starting to kind of freak out? Like there are SO MANY SPECIES and we know absolutely zilch about the vast majority. What does a copepod dream about? What are their hobbies? What are their culture wars like?

ChatGPT’s signature writing style is everywhere now, and I hate it. It reminds me of when we tried mixing all the beverages at the soda fountain in middle school. We didn’t actually create the perfect drink, we just made a cloying monstrosity that lost everything good about its constituent parts.

An ivy league university library just ordered one-one copy of all our Priyanka Paul, Larchtongue, Kuzhali Manickavel, Kaimaurundai, and Avakkai & Chukka zines Why not put on a tie, light up a pipe, talk with an underbite, and order some for yourself? www.blaft.com/collections/...

Had the thought "at least when I'm dead I won't have to do two factor authentication ever again", but then realized that I cannot say what horrors lie in that undiscovered country. (I'm not dying, just very tired.)

Caroliner Rainbow! A rare live performance 🎭🎶 #SF

This is an excellent collection of stories! @blaftrakesh.bsky.social @kuzhalimanickavel.bsky.social

This article doesn't even get into how goofball the actual text of the Arthashastra is. A lot of it's about dressing up in snake costumes and blowing clouds of smoke out of your nose, or pretending to see comets that aren't there. www.indiatoday.in/education-to...