ABOUT ME

My name is Piper, I'm 18, and I use she/her pronouns... and of course, none of that really tells you anything about me, but that's how people always open these.
I was born in Alberta, Canada, which is a dry, cold, mostly-empty place not unlike the surface of Mars. This fall, I'll be moving to B.C. to study biology at one of the universities there. Not telling you which.

I'd describe myself as generally laid-back, hardworking, with a dry sense of humor. Whether you agree with this assessment or not is up to you. I aspire to someday work in medicine or chemical engineering, but that's a long way off still. In the meantime, I really do enjoy being a student.

My hobbies and interests generally center around low-brow art in all its forms--B-movies, street art, rock posters, underground comics, cartoons, marketing art, signage, video games, shoujo manga, sci-fi literature, toys...
Basically anything mass-produced and genre-oriented. The way that meaning and beauty almost accidentally emerge through these art forms fascinates me, and I'm just enough of a loser or kid-at-heart (depending on who you ask) for me to enjoy them as intended.
My other greatest interest is the almighty rock-and-roll and everything that surrounds it: subculture, music history, fashion, urban legends, and adjacent media.
I was sorta born into that stuff; both my parents have been super into punk rock since forever ago. I guess I'm the opposite of the stereotypical teenager rebelling against her parents with loud music and bad decisions!

I also have a passion for human and animal biology, and chemistry in general. Some hobbies of mine include birdwatching, people-watching, drawing, paddleboarding, and of course writing for this website.

I was diagnosed with autism in the sixth grade, and I can't say a day goes by where I wish I didn't have it, but I also can't say I'd recognize myself without it. So make of that what you will, I guess. If I have difficulty reading or projecting tone in verbal or textual conversation, please be patient.

CONTACT ME

My E-mail is badgersaurus@disroot.org.
I really do like E-mails as a form of communication and would deeply appreciate any letters!

If you're more into instantaneous simultaneous conversation,
as most people are nowadays,
you can ring me on Discord at @badgersaurus.
I'm on there pretty often for mostly school and real-life friendship reasons, so you should get a response soon enough.

I have no social media accounts for a very long list of reasons (I'm against their use of personal data, their intentional promotion of political strife and youth mental illness, and their 'brain-fade'-encouraging formats that place war news and violent tragedy on the same mental level as cat videos and comedy skits) but you can 'follow' me at one of my media-tracking profiles:

See what minor- and major-motion pictures I've seen on Trakt!

See what books n' comix I've been reading on Storygraph!

See what crappy video game I've inexplicably put loadsa hours into this month on Backloggd!

See what piles of cardboard n' plastic I've been playing with on BoardGameGeek!

ABOUT BADGERSAURUS

Badgersaurus is a character I came up with in summer 2021, right before I started high-school. She's a minor kaiju (about the size of a three-story building or so), maybe from outer space or maybe from here, half-badger and half-unspecified-dinosaur (stegosaurus spikes, T-rex teeth, ambiguous relatability to a wide audience.) She's like me, but with the major differences of being very large and hard to ignore and knowing how to play guitar. Oh, and she can breathe fire, of course.

The first-ever doodle of Badgersaurus, circa July 2021.
She kinda looks like she's about to sneeze here.

Why Badgersaurus? I associate both of these animals with strong symbolism; the badger, to me, represents hard work, perseverance, strong family bonds, and fighting spirit. They're cute but very tough and have some fascinating biological aspects--a lineage of European badgers may inhabit the same sett (burrow) for a century or more, and they are capable of delayed implantation when mating (so they mate in the winter but only become pregnant in the spring.) Badgers in Britain also have the unusual distinction of being both a locally-protected species seen as a national symbol and the subject of a rather cruel yearly cull; an animal that toes the line between well-liked and deeply offensive, apparently, to those British MPs. That dualistic angle is fascinating (and concerning) to me.

As for dinosaurs--the number of dinosaur kaiju far outstrips the number of non-dinosaur kaiju, and I've been crazy about 'em since I was a kid. Ceratopsians and sauropods are my favourite, but I've a fondness for all the herbivores, and the spinosaurid, tyrannosaurid and dromaeosaurid species as well. There's also the idea of a creature which is a common woodland animal somehow containing the essence of something thought extinct millions of years ago--Badgersaurus is an old soul, so to speak, and I like to think I am too in a way.

I think I chose the kaiju angle... well, because I like kaiju movies and toys, but also because I spent essentially all of middle school and much of high school as an essentially invisible presence in the student body. A giant monster is the exact opposite of that--no matter how hard you try, you can't really ignore a giant lizard stomping through Tokyo the way you can climate change or racism in 'tolerant' leftist circles or the weird disabled kid in the back of class. Everybody has their own slightly-scuffed psychoanalysis of Godzilla and that's mine: he's here, he's alive, and he won't let you forget it! And Badgersaurus is the same.