80AcresOnline

There’s a site that will generate imaginary moths if you retweet its Twitter account (@mothgenerator) and tweet you an image of the same.   I thought it would be fun to see if I could get it to do an 80-acres moth.  And it did.   Turns out whatever message you send that account turns into a moth named whatever you sent, with “the” in front and “moth” after.  Here’s the 80 acres moth

And when I forgot that it’s a bot, and sent a thank you note to the account, I got another moth, this one named for the entire thank you tweet, but I’ve shortened it to the WOW moth, the first word of the thank-you.  It fits.

Since these are imaginary moths, I can give them imaginary scientific names, right?  Right.  Both moths are in the same genus, since they are related through the Bot-father of both.   The genus name is Pseudoktizo (which means roughly “false-created,” not “created” like natural things.)  Not the only word I could’ve used but I like the look of it more than “poieo” which also means simply “make.”  Probably got the right person/tense wrong, but since I’m the maker of the name, first person singular works for me, even though I wasn’t the machine that generated the moth images.  You can overthink these things.

So, species names.  The 80 acres moth: “chloros-epiblema” (green shawl) or “epiblemachloros”….I’ll think about that.   The Wow! moth just has to be “exclamans.”

Let me introduce to the world, therefore, two hitherto unknown, uncollected, unphotographed moth species:  Pseudoktizo chloros-epiblema and Pseudoktizo exclamans.  You may find them turning up in my books at some point.  In fact, I might decide to go back and create scientific names for every imaginary critter in every single book or story…and then put them all into a pseudo-taxonomic tome.  That could be…a remarkably erudite way to procrastinate, right?  Much more fun than almost anything I’m *supposed* to be doing.

(Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip the waitstaff.)