Cartoonist and sculptor Dyland Edwards draws and sculpts little feeping creatures as part of an ongoing effort to increase the number of monsters in people’s homes and offices. That strikes me as an extremely worthwhile goal.

The name particularly amuses me: A perennial problem for software developers is feature creep, the tendency for a program to pick up additional (and unnecessary) bells and whistles that were never in the original requirements document. This is often referred to as “creeping featurism,” and since programmers tend to be a silly lot, it’s often deliberately spoonerized to “feeping creaturism.”*

Edwards has made the creatures that feep a reality, and they look exactly like I’d expect something that scuttles around in the depths of a server, feeping softly to itself, to look.

He sells many of his sculptures at fan conventions, but some of them (and also drawings of them) are available in his Etsy shop. They’re gratifyingly inexpensive and highly whimsical.

You can see loads of other examples of his work at his Feep o’the Morning blog, which has unusually specific categories like “Dervishes” and “Waffles.” If you like to play around with polymer clay, the site is a great source of inspiration to make sculptures of your own.

I’m beginning to suspect that my totem animal is the feeping creature, so I may get one to perch on my monitor and glare at when management asks me to make “one little change” to the code.

*This is the same programming tendency that causes us to refer to something done for historical reasons as being done “for hysterical raisins.” It passes the time.