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Lucky Instar
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August 7, 2026
Group Project Announcement - Blind Choice:
Do you have a big encyclopedia or guidebook or textbook or manual next to your desk? Flip to a random page, find a topic you didn't know much about before, research it, and do a quick write-up on whatever you found. Share what you learned with the blaugust community - let's both learn something new.
It can be any kind of manual or text - video game guides, Python manuals, a dictionary, an old textbook. Whatever you want to do!
If you wann…
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Musings Over Pints and Coffee
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People describe the empty nest like a threshold you cross once. The last kid loads the last box, the taillights disappear down the street, and you walk back into a house that has gone suddenly, permanently quiet. Then, the story goes, you stand in the doorway of a room that isn’t a bedroom anymore and you feel the whole thing land at once. Grief on one side, freedom on the other, a clean line between the before and the after.
That’s the version everybody hands you. It rests on two quiet assumpti…
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Lucky Instar
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August 6, 2026
Threadsnakes are (get this) snakes, in the family Leptotyphlopidae, and are also called blind snakes. They are very tiny, usually not exceeding 12 inches, and look like small earthworms. Upon closer inspection, they are not worms because they have tiny dot eyes (as if drawn on by pencil) and a mouth with a jaw!
They barely have much of a mouth, with the upper jaws being immobile and without any teeth. They're found pretty on pretty much every continent except for Australia but are…
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Lucky Instar
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August 5, 2026
don't cry. 20,000+ species of bees, ok? source.
I love bees, they are one of my favorite groups of animals, and they appear to be becoming increasingly popular in the cultural zeitgeist - lots of stickers, dishtowels, etc stating 'save the bees', and so on. Despite this, lots of laypeople seem to misunderstand bees fundamentally, which I guess is ok, they are an incredibly diverse group of insects. Any public positive interest in an insect is a win. But I think it would be great i…
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Lucky Instar
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August 4, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then research it and do a short write up.
Today's random bee:
Genus: Caupolicana
Family: Colletidae
subfamily: Diphaglossinae
Caupolicana bee. Photo by Luis Flores Prado, laderasur.com
There are over 50 species in this genus. All are large and fuzzy bees from the southern half of the US, Mexico, and Central and Southern America,…
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The Ghastly Mirror
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My Third Blaugust entry, In Which my Gardening Adventures Lead me to find a very pleasant suprise.
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Lucky Instar
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August 3, 2026
In the southwestern USA, with its cacti, mountains, and deserts, there are certain stereotypical animals that everyone knows: the coyote howling at the moon, the scorpion scuttling on the sand, the roadrunner crossing the highway, the rattlesnake coiling up into a strike pose.
But what many people don't know is that this region is a biodiversity hotspot, meaning it has more plant and animal species than surrounding regions. The southwestern deserts have some of the most bee specie…