Website Found: American Monsters

Reading Time

What is it?
American Monsters is a website with a far larger scope than the name suggests. Gathered there is a huge supply of useful information on cryptozoology, or, for those that don’t know what that is, the “scientific” study of the unknown and mysterious creatures on this planet (such as Loch Ness, Big Foot, and creatures that we know for a fact actually exist–as in physical evidence like a dead body). The website features:

  • Monsters page which divides creatures by type (such as avian, hairy, and hybrid). WHen you click a specific type it takes you to another page that lists reported incidents with creatures that fit into that category.
  • A map that allows you to click icons representing certain monsters, which brings up on the world map several dots representing known sightings. This is actually pretty neat. You’d be amazed how widespread some creatures are as far as sightings are concerned.
  • Sightings form that allows you to report your own sightings of the unknown.
  • Vanguard and Pioneers pages, which provides detailed information about folks, new and old, who have either participated in the expansion of cryptozoological knowledge or perhaps had some sort of ancient connection to it (such as a Saint; yup, a Saint).
  • A gallery of images, a media guide for finding out about programming of interest in your area, a skeptics page, a forum, a links page, and a store.

Why is it cool?
I’m particularly impressed by the organization of the website, though it could use with expanding their knowledge base. Still, considering it has a forum for discussion and potential for being a comprehensive site for all you need to know about Big Foot and his friends.

Give it a look.

(Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)

Email
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Digg
Reddit
LinkedIn

One Response

  1. Cool find, a word of warning, they do seem to link to at last one site (flyingrods.com) which distributes malware. (Thanks to google and Firefox for bailing me out.) Still, it’s nicely done.

Leave a Reply

Follow Me

Newsletter

Support Me

Recent Posts

A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Read More »

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

Read More »

2025: The Year of Something

We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Read More »