Aw, Nice, Thanks For The Bat Friend!

lets get fruit with mama

how bout bulldog bat!euripedes wearing one of them novelty fishing hats?

"let any fish who meets my gaze learn the true meaning of fear, for I am the harbinger of death; the bane of creatures subaqueous. for my claws are true and unwavering, as I glide above the surface of the aquatic abyss."

or unaltered text hat, merely strategically transferred from an outdoor store to end up resting atop the head of Euripedes. maybe the brim is lined with superglue too, so it stays on while flying. and resists the best attempts of Vikus to remove it.

Take this 🦇

Part 2 of flapflap friends, for anyone who might have wanted to see the little guy actually flap. Bats have very neat locomotion! (Also, for any nervous parties, I’m vaccinated against rabies and this little guy’s mouth did not come near my bare skin at any point. I took a glove off to shoot this video, which i wasn’t supposed to do, but there was very low risk here.)

From jellybean to (frosted) cinnamon bread loaf...

Juvenile Eastern Red Bat, via

Thumbless Bat Skull (Furipterus horrens)

Since there weren’t many good reference photos of the thumbless bat available (a tragedy!!), I took a shot at its bizarre-looking skull. Evolution has done to many bats what man has cruelly wrought on domestic dogs- though the difference is that it actually works for the bats.

The thumbless bat, as you might imagine from looking at this skull, has a very squished-in face, with fur and skin obscuring the extreme bend above the eyes. This might aid it in echolocation by turning its head into a radar dish, similar to an owl’s. There are definitely a lot of bats that seem to have converged on the flattened-face design. But that isn’t an Official Scientist’s Opinion, just mine.

I should mention that despite their common name, thumbless bats actually DO have thumbs, just reduced ones with tiny, functionless claws. This brings up the question of how they crawl, since most bats use their thumbs like pitons while moving around on their roosts. The answer may be that they just don’t crawl that much- a creature thoroughly adapted to life in the air.

Another fun fact about thumbless bats: their nipples are located on their abdomen, rather than under their armpits like most bats. This means the babies have to orient themselves head-up on their mothers (who are hanging upside-down, of course) to nurse. But how do they do this without functional thumbs to hold on with? I have so many questions that the internet cannot answer.

Finally, please enjoy this thumbless bat art by famed naturalist Ernst Haeckel, circa 1904:

I can’t stop thinking about how long Golbat is when he closes his mouth

I'm seeing a lot of posts on my dash today encouraging folks to start archiving their favorite online resources, in case they might be at risk of disappearing in the near future. Since privacy and data ownership are major interests of mine, it seems like a good time to share a bit of what I know! I hope that some of this might be helpful--please feel free to reach out if there's a specific question that comes to mind! 💕

(My bona fides, in case anyone wants to know: I do work in tech, with over fifteen years of experience in the same. Linux systems administration is a hobby of mine, and privacy, particularly as it relates to tech, is very near and dear to my heart. That said, I am not an infosec professional, so you may want to supplement this guidance with your own research, depending on your threat model.)

General advice

If you rely heavily on traditional cloud storage providers, like Google Drive and Dropbox, now is the time to start exporting your important files to a more secure location. Data stored with most online platforms is encrypted at rest, but the encryption keys are stored on the server's side, meaning that the contents of your files can still be accessed by the service providers themselves. This also means that your files and their contents are vulnerable to data breaches, DMCA takedown requests, subpoenas, and the oh-so-popular AI scraping that has wormed its way into nearly every tech product of note. (Including Tumblr! Lucky us!) Saving files on your own computer is one option, but if you want something closer to the Google Drive experience, Proton Drive is my recommendation. Free accounts get 5 GB of storage, and all data is end-to-end encrypted, which means even Proton can't read the contents of your files. A suite of document features were rolled out earlier this year, including rich text editing, collaboration, and sharing, so if you use Google Docs for writing, you can use Proton in pretty much the same way. I also use Proton for my email, and I'm happy to vouch for them--they are nonprofit-backed, EU-based, and all of their products are built on privacy from the ground up. If you have an Apple device, you can also turn on Advanced Data Protection for your iCloud account, which will enable end-to-end encryption for most services. (Notably, mail, contacts, and calendars will remain unchanged, to ensure compatibility with standard protocols.) This might be a good option for folks who already have iCloud services and who don't want to set up anything new. You can learn more about how to enable this feature here.

Archiving websites

There are a number of ways to archive specific webpages, depending on how much content you want to preserve and how tech-y of a solution you're willing to tolerate. A web clipper is probably the most straightforward option: install one of the listed notes apps, install the web clipper browser extension, open the page you want to save, and clip clip clip. The images and text (with formatting) will be stripped from the page and saved to a note in your app. Both Joplin and Obsidian's apps are available cross-platform:

Joplin + Joplin Web Clipper

Obsidian + Obsidian Web Clipper

Notes you create in Joplin are encrypted before being saved to your device, while Obsidian's notes are saved to a location of your choosing in plain-text Markdown format. If you aren't sure which to choose, choose Obsidian--it's a little easier to use right out of the box.

If you want to preserve the full context of the webpages you save, similar to what you'd see on archive.org, SingleFile is a browser extension that lets you save complete web pages as a single HTML file. You'll find links to the various browser extensions, as well as documentation, on the project's GitHub page:

GitHub

GitHub - gildas-lormeau/SingleFile: Web Extension for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file

Web Extension for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file - gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

Note that these files can get pretty big. In general, I'd recommend a web clipper for most cases, but it's good to have multiple options on hand!

Other tips

Even in the absence of major geopolitical events, it's worth remembering that anything you see online can change or be removed at any time. Keep backups of anything that's important to you. (And make sure you back up your computer, too!) Have an alternate contact method for your online friends, in case one platform goes down or otherwise becomes inaccessible.

Consider signing up for a Signal account, if you haven't already, and recommend that your friends and family do the same. It's a free end-to-end encrypted chat platform, and unlike some privacy-focused chat protocols (looking at you, Matrix), it's easily accessible to non-techies. Don't use email, DMs, Discord, Slack, etc. for any communication that you expect to keep private. Any platform that can access your messages will give them up to authorities if compelled to do so by a court order or subpoena. This is not a theoretical risk. It is happening to people in the US right now. I am being so, so serious about this.

If you're looking for a new creative hobby, why not teach yourself a little HTML and CSS? Neocities is a great place to build your own website, and it's free. And it's fun! (If you make something, please drop the link, because I want to see.)

Breathe. We have to survive this, somehow. Log off for today, if you have to. Drink some water. Pet a cat. Sit outside and watch the birds, just for a few minutes. Believe that we will be okay, however you can. ❤️

one of the best academic paper titles