Not to be controversial but this website (and life in general) is much more enjoyable when you spend your energy on talking about the things you love rather than the things you hate and trying to drag everyone down with you, some of us are over here trying to be happy.
Had a big bushel of dollar tree skeletons I’d amassed over the years and felt it had a natural ghost-like shape so I hung these eyeballs on them and accidentally invented a new castlevania boss I guess
Had a big bushel of dollar tree skeletons I’d amassed over the years and felt it had a natural ghost-like shape so I hung these eyeballs on them and accidentally invented a new castlevania boss I guess
I’ve briefly touched on this subject before, both on tumblr and on my website, but this is my very small collection of rubber Melophagus, and I think it’s just fascinating, in a very sad way, that this insect was ever considered recognizable enough for MULTIPLE styles of gumball machine toy.
These insects are actually wingless, parasitic flies more commonly known as “keds,” and they mostly infest the wool of sheep…an animal I’ve personally only ever seen at a distance. I have never actually met a sheep up close in my entire life.
But that statement would be BAFFLING to people just a few generations back. There was a time before the farming crisis, before industrial-scale agriculture and outsourcing when the average child would have been up close with every kind of barnyard animal at some point, and one nasty chore they might have been given would have been to help rid sheep of these very insects before their droppings ruined the wool.
All three of my rubber keds came from different ebay auctions, and were listed as “SPIDER THING?” “Beetle/cockroach” and just “bug.”
Our society forgot that this insect existed because it only crossed paths with us in the context of very hands-on, old-fashioned agriculture, and that is something that became thoroughly alien to the average American practically overnight.