Spiders I Have Known

On Reddit, there’s something called “low-effort content”, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Example: you’re on Hearthstone Reddit and instead of making a detailed and hilarious post using neural networks, you post a screenshot of your game and add a snarky comment to it. 

“Spiders I Have Known” is low-effort content.  

Zambia is a warm, tropical country. Hence, we have creepy-crawlies of all kinds; most prominent are spiders. You can either be terrified of spiders and hate your life, or learn to live in harmony with them.

Featured Spider #1: Spider on the Inside of my Mosquito Net

One day I woke at 5 AM to find see  a dark blob two inches away from my face. I cautiously turned on my phone flashlight to find… a spider! Not on the outside of my mosquito net, but the inside! How did it get there? I wondered. I rushed to the living room, then the bathroom, to see if it would move while I was away.

Then I looked at the bathroom sink. And there it was!!! It had followed me!

But in a plot twist, it turned out it wasn’t the same spider, just one of the same species. Because when I went back to my room the little guy you see above was scuttling into my closet. Maybe it’s still there.

Somewhat morbidly, its compatriot stayed in the same place in the sink in a web for days. On the fourth day, we realized it had been dead the whole time.

Featured Spider #2: Spider with a Nap Crevice

This one lived in the hallway. There was a crack in the ceiling, as you can see above, and sometimes it liked to hang out halfway inside the crack, so only three of its legs hung out.

I soon realized there was rhyme and reason to its hidey-hole times. It had similar circadian rhythms to an overworked human, and from 23:00 to 5:00 it would sit in its hidey-hole, while during the rest of the day it would move roughly two feet down the wall. About once a week it would take a midday nap.

After about a month, it decided to go on vacation to an adjacent wall. A few days later, it decided to hide behind my door. I said hello but that scared it off forever.

Featured Spider #3: Praying Mantis

It’s not a spider. But I don’t have any more pictures of spiders. Plus it was cool.

Other Spiders I have Known

The One Who Laid Eggs in My Wholemeal Flour. The Four-Legged Kitchen Dweller. “Hullo Young Spider”. The Queen of Ants. The Adorable Baby Jumping Spider.

Go on, look up “baby jumping spider”. It was so cute that I included an adult jumping spider as the cover photo, because that was all I could find in stock photos.

In Other News…

My development life has been roaring along: I’ve been drafting a survey, which is harder than it sounds and takes a ton of mental energy. You’re thinking about academic content, ease of translation, sentence ambiguity, cultural differences, logic, prompting, and a host of other things, while trying to focus on the objectives of the survey. It’s been a lot of fun, learning, and tiredness.