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Cheer up, Black Metal Cats! Bubblegum Puppies

Do you know the Black Metal Cats Twitter account? As explained in this great introduction, it “combines kitties with heavy metal lyrics”. I know the account because I follow Scott Chamberlain who retweets them a lot, which I enjoy as far as one can enjoy such a dark mood. Speaking of which, I decided to try and transform Black Metal Cat tweets into something more positive… The Bubblegum Puppies were born!

The Guardian Experience: heavy or light topics?

I’ve recently been binge-reading The Guardian Experience columns. I’m a big fan of The Guardian life and style section regulars: the blind dates to which I dedicated a blog post, Oliver Burkeman’s This column will change your life, etc. Experience is another regular that I enjoy a lot. In each of the column, someone tells something remarkable that happened to them. It can really be anything.

I was thinking of maybe scraping the titles and get a sense of most common topics. The final push was my husband’s telling me about this article of Gabriella Paiella’s about the best Guardian Experience columns. She wrote “the “Experience” column does often touch on heavier topics”. Can one know what is the most prevalent “weight” of Experience columns scraping all their titles?

Hundreds of Guardian blind dates

One of my more or less guilty pleasures is reading The Guardian blind date each week. I think I started doing this when living in Cambridge, England for five months. I would buy i every weekday and The Guardian week-end every week-end. I wasn’t even dating at the time I discovered The Guardian blind dates but I’ve always liked their format.

I get so much into each date report that seeing both participants say they want to meet again makes me ridiculously happy. I like wondering how matches were made, but today I just want to look into the contents of post-date interviews.

The animals of #actuallivingscientists

These last days a trending Twitter hashtag was “#actuallivingscientist”, whose origin can be find in this convo and whose original goal was to allow scientists to present themselves to everyone, a sort of #scicomm action. A great initiative, because we need science and we need everyone to know how it’s done, by actual human beings.

I didn’t tweet with the hashtag, but I consider myself a scientist with more or less experience in different fields – and my last post was about the scientist I married. In my timeline thanks to Auriel Fournier there were many tweets of ecologists studying animals. I’d like to say cute animals but some were carcasses… But still, it made me want to quantify which animals were the most present in the tweets. Any bet?