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A’liya Spinner

@cladist-magpie.bsky.social
35 followers 27 following 62 posts

PhD candidate at UConn. Entomological archivist. Author of fiction (speculative) and non-fiction (sciency) in various places. Novel on query (represent me?) Unapologetically queer. she/him. ajhspinner.wixsite.com/aliyaspinner

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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Well despite all my complicated feelings, I have officially moved to Connecticut for graduate school. Of course the first bit of decoration I did in the new apartment was set up my “gay bird” shelf featuring barn owls and Northern cardinals, the main couple and characters of my novel.
A book shelf featuring an assembly of barn owls and cardinals. It includes a pair of Webkinz, a pair of finger puppets, a pair of highly-articulated fidget toys, a pair of stone figurines, a pair of small artworks, and a pair of vials with hedgehog quills and a bird’s foot.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Today I learned that UMich has the Holo and Allotype for all seven species of periodical cicadas.
A phone camera picture of a camera screen displaying a close-up on the underside of a cicada’s head. It has a long proboscis and eyes which bulge out comedically to the side.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Coworker asked me to help them sex an insect I walk over and it’s a grasshopper with THE longest ovipositor I’ve ever seen I was like hmmm it’s giving girl vibes to me
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I was extremely honored to be asked to read my short story and I also got to yap about Star Trek and the museum yippee
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
The final product gives mystique but the set-up is pure nonsense.
A grasshopper posed ridiculously under a large micro-photography lens.A photo of a computer screen showing a high resolution, handsome close-up of a grasshopper’s face.
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Reposted by A’liya Spinner
Air and Nothingness Press @aanpress.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
The pre-launch link for our next KS book campaign is now active - www.kickstarter.com/projects/526... #sff #bookshy #sf #fantasy Hope you'll join AaN's campaign and pledge to help bring two new books to life and support talented authors.
kickstarter.com
Coming soon: Two Intriguing AaN Anthologies: One Campaign
Two Anthologies: "Are You Everything Alright" and "Endings"
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Anthropology has a walk-in freezer (which I have card access to for silly insect reasons) and every day after undergoing the HARROWING 3 minute walk to work I have to go stand in there for like 5 minutes (read: it is very hot outside)
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Trying to explain to my father that I, assistant collection manager of entomology at one of the largest museums in the world, do not want to go into the kitchen because I saw a house centipede in there and I’m debilitatingly afraid of large (live) arthropods Thought he was gonna fall over laughing
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
My new flash piece “Xenodiplomacy” continues my legacy of sneaking aliens (the Sun Wyrm is an old design of mine) into Air & Nothingness’ catalogue of fabulous books. “Coffee or Tea, Stars, and Gravity” is another unique, well-made, and worth-reading book from @aanpress.bsky.social
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Air and Nothingness Press @aanpress.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
If you are a quick reader and have finished "Tea or Coffee, Stars, and Gravity", the authors might and AaN definitely would appreciate a review over at - www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...
goodreads.com
Tea or Coffee, Stars, and Gravity
Tea and Coffee - ordinary part of so many of our shared…
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Some of my Type specimen photography is live on Orthoptera Species File! This is extremely exciting for like, 5 people in the whole world.
A close-up photograph of the head of Nickleium biforma, a Chilean katydid, on the website “Orthoptera Species File”. Aliya Spinner is credited as the creator.
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Air and Nothingness Press @aanpress.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
In the pay it forward department, it seems AaN has inspired two new press imprints to be born. I wish the publisher/editors of both all the best and you have our full support and enthusiasm.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
“Still life? More like still dead.” Museum study #4
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Finished reading Notre-Dame de Paris recently and was explaining to a (different) friend that Esmeralda is actually ethnically white but culturally Romani in the book. She turns around and hits me with this:
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Alien: Earth is excellent but there is a really funny scene where the eyeball monster (which is supposed to be scarily intelligent) takes over a guy, tackles (but does not kill?) a crewmate, then makes a clicking sound to summon the xenomorph which IMMEDIATELY kicks its ass and it has to scurry off
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
Got my friend to read the Mabinogion. He’s reading the original Victorian-era Guest translation, which we discovered through conversation is missing a lot of details from the original text that might “offend” Victorian audiences. Thus this was born.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Do creationists who believe human births are uniquely dangerous among the animal kingdom because of God’s curse on Eve think that humans had like, a quadrupedal gait in Eden? Or maybe babies were like half the size and finished developing outside the womb like a kangaroo joey? I hope it’s that one
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
My mother told me the new dog sitter we found for our.. difficult German shepherd.. was a former teacher who decided dogs were his true passion and now runs a dog daycare from his house. I went with mom today to drop off Zarza and tell me why my 9TH GRADE MATH TEACHER walks out to get her lmao
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
We have one of those Little People nativities we set up every year, but we lost one of the wise men when I was like six. I, a genius child, replaced him with a woman zoologist from a different set and her gift to baby Jesus is three giraffes. To this day that continues to be canon in our house
A Fischer-Prince Little People nativity scene. One wise man has been replaced with a colorful female zoologist toy. In addition to the set’s original camel and donkeys, there are three giraffes.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Apparently it was PICTURE DAY at the collections today and we had real, professional photographers for the first time in like 10 years. And my boss didn’t tell us. All the techs showed up in our graphic t-shirts and hoodies and meanwhile he’s over there in his button-down and tie
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
My @sfwa.org membership has been approved, so now I can brag about that! Yippee!! I would like to specially shout out @aanpress.bsky.social for being my first and third pro-sale. And @solarpunklitmag.bsky.social for publishing “Mothership”, basically half of my total fiction earnings. Ily both ❤️
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
My SFWA membership application has officially been submitted 🫡
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Predator: Badlands is proof that making things woke and gay and feminized actually makes them 10x cooler that shit was awesome
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Moderately sad that probably my best work to date was published a year before I knew anything about award nominations/awards in general (not that I’d win—but I’d want the chance to try.) Especially given I haven’t had anything published in almost a year now. Anyone wanna uhh reprint Mothership?
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
Unsubtly queer employee at unspecified fast casual restaurant chain complimented my gay shirt and then gave me a free drink. I feel loved.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
I had an outdated species name at work today that took me to Swedish Wikipedia. Apparently the AI they used the mass-generate base entries for human editing/fact checking was the only entity in the world that remembered this outdated synonym and no one had edited it out yet
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Anyone else getting those ads with the lady eagerly announcing the official color for 2026 and it’s like, a depressing ash grey (I don’t retain advertiser names so I don’t remember which paint company (?) decided to make this our official color)
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
Once again asking for good lurking recommendations as I try to defeat my Twitter addiction. Right now the League Worlds tournament has been delivering good content on Twitter but I fear the overlap of people who play League and people who use BlueSky may be just me.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
Got accidentally fired from my job. Couldn’t access the faculty page to log my hours and sent a confused email to my boss and HR department. HR confusedly forwarded it to a different HR, who said my “appointment” had expired? Anyways my boss had to reassure them I was still a valued employee.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Sometimes working in the collections means finding a dead mole by the parking lot, asking the mammal curator if he wants it, and getting sent back out with a ziplock bag and gloves. He was fairly impressed because usually these carcasses are too decayed to collect when found. Not mine tho
A rigid, fairly fresh mole carcass in a ziplock bag, being held by a blue-gloved hand. The hole’s massive front feet are particularly prominent.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
I know it’s not even top 300 most evil things he’s done, but the current administration just casually making graduate school/programs ten times as difficult to get into is such a bummer. So many amazing advisors in utter despair as they warn me the funding is getting slimmer and slimmer.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Just imagine if you’d read my Contingent article but instead of looking at a picture of a cute bumblebee it was a huge grasshopper with spikes on every single one of its feet and “bite your finger” shaped mandibles
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Big-Bee is officially ended, and I’m playfully apprehensive to reveal my new digitization project. These guys are not so… charismatic as the bees that made such good spokesinsects for conservation and museum collections
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
Finally updated my website. Most notable: two new FUTURES articles for Starset and my Contingent article are live on the non-fiction page. Unfortunately I somehow managed to make my footer tremendously long and Wix won’t let me shrink it. So ignore that ajhspinner.wixsite.com/aliyaspinner...
ajhspinner.wixsite.com
Non-Fiction | Aliyaspinner
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
Happy to have made the cut!… a month belated. I’ve been really humbled by the positive reception to my Contingent piece about the entomology collections and my work, which can seem so small and yet has such a big impact.
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My Father’s Daughter @aninsggirb.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
“Our natural history is held in these archives, a history which can only be discovered thru support for both the collection & its stewards.”- @cladist-magpie.bsky.social Tens of millions of dollars in NSF grants have been slashed: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/02/1...
technologyreview.com
The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies
Tens of millions of dollars in NSF grants have been slashed, and scientists fear the US is about to lose a generation of climate researchers.
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Reposted by A’liya Spinner
Contingent Magazine @contingent-mag.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
For the next entry in our Losses series, A’liya Spinner takes us into an NSF-funded project threatened by government cuts. "These ambassadors for entomology have already taught us so much about evolution, phylogeny, and climate change by acting as miniature windows into natural history."
contingentmagazine.org
The Losses: Of Archives and Arthropods
Dead for centuries, the bees can help save their living descendants
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 30/10/2023
If I were disgustingly wealthy I would spend it all patroning the arts like God intended and my first commission would be a full-cast re-recording of the Hunchback of Notre Dame musical that 1) replaces all the g-slurs with Roma & Romani 2) adds a Rest & Recreation reprise
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 23/10/2023
Bestie/boyf/I finally finished Saws 1-9 in preparation for Saw X/to get cultured. Here’s every Jigsaw killer AS I REMEMBER THEM: 1. John Kramer 2. John + Amanda 3. J & A (RIP) 4. Copguy Hoffman 5. Hoffman again??? 6. Lady Kramer vs Hoffman 7. Cary Elwes 8. White guy (best one) 9. Skank
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 22/10/2023
The bestie and boyf and I are participating today in the extraordinarily popular cultural phenomenon Helicoprion* in which we watch Jaws and Spiral: From the Book of Saw back to back * Helicoprion is a genus of extinct shark known for its spiral-shaped “whorl” tooth
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 12/10/2023
Unstoppable Force (me holding up the entire line checking every pocket for my mCard so I can get on the bus) versus an Immovable Object (a very polite construction worker who refuses to get on the bus before me for chivalry reasons)
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 04/10/2023
Being zoology’s longest-working lab tech definitely has its upsides (researchers chat with me, I’ve had some post-grant job offers, the illusion of superiority, etc) but I know I am ultimately only the mini-boss. The entomologist’s goon. I can never match the chaotic stage presence that my boss has.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 04/10/2023
Telling my boss (an entomologist) that the reason I don’t like to swim outdoors is because I accidentally swallowed a dead centipede in an outdoor pool when I was like, 11, and his response is “was it delish?”
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 01/10/2023
Reading a paleontologist’s response to another paleontologist who wrote a book criticizing *his* book and it includes several hilarious moments and THIS banger: “The way [he] goes about biting the hand that once fed him would make a shoal of piranha seem decorous.”
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Sketched three of my novel characters as “Esmeralda und Phoebus von Claude Frollo ueberrascht” by Auguste Couder (1837) during a Deadlands session last night. Those familiar with the novel know that I’ve designated the entire Hunchback of Notre Dame musical as its soundtrack.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 02/09/2023
I don’t necessarily REGRET chickening out of making my senior quote “God is a cladist and I am a fish”, but I do sort of wish I could’ve seen if the yearbook committee tried to stop me on that one.
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 02/09/2023
Anybody know any good Blue Sky drama I can lurk? My Twitter feed is like 60% asoiaf Blacks vs. Greens discourse (team Black forever btw I genuinely think Green stans just hate women) but I can’t seem to find that energy here. Please help— I love lurking discourse instead of working on my novel
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A’liya Spinner @cladist-magpie.bsky.social · 02/09/2023
The latest of my nonfiction work is LIVE with The Long Now Foundation. In three vignettes, I imagine the life & afterlife of a Xylocopa fimbriata. How do you archive something that predates you and will outlive you, too? With love— with respect, with a perspective that spans for centuries.
longnow.org
The Three-Century Lifespan of the Modern Bee
The preservation of individual bee specimens across the centuries allows us to embrace the temporal expanse of what came before us, and leave good records for those who follow.
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