{"id":18154,"date":"2013-04-18T06:16:14","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T11:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=18154"},"modified":"2013-04-12T13:02:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:02:55","slug":"feeping-creatures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=18154","title":{"rendered":"Feeping Creatures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/feep-146x150.jpg\" alt=\"Feeping Creature\" width=\"146\" height=\"150\"  class=\"contentimg\" \/>Cartoonist and sculptor Dyland Edwards draws and sculpts little <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feepingcreatures.com\/\">feeping creatures<\/a> as part of an ongoing effort to increase the number of monsters in people&#8217;s homes and offices.  That strikes me as an extremely worthwhile goal.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;creeping featurism,&#8221; and since programmers tend to be a silly lot, it&#8217;s often deliberately spoonerized to &#8220;feeping creaturism.&#8221;*<\/p>\n<p>Edwards has made the creatures that feep a reality, and they look exactly like I&#8217;d expect something that scuttles around in the depths of a server, feeping softly to itself, to look.<\/p>\n<p>He sells many of his sculptures at fan conventions, but some of them (and also drawings of them) are available in his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.etsy.com\/shop\/feepingcreatures\">Etsy shop<\/a>.  They&#8217;re gratifyingly inexpensive and highly whimsical.<\/p>\n<p>You can see loads of other examples of his work at his <a href=\"http:\/\/feepingcreatures.blogspot.com\/\">Feep o&#8217;the Morning blog<\/a>, which has unusually specific categories like &#8220;Dervishes&#8221; and &#8220;Waffles.&#8221;  If you like to play around with polymer clay, the site is a great source of inspiration to make sculptures of your own.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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 &#8220;one little change&#8221; to the code.<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<br \/>\n*This is the same programming tendency that causes us to refer to something done for historical reasons as being done &#8220;for hysterical raisins.&#8221;  It passes the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-needful-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18154"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18160,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18154\/revisions\/18160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}