So it’s been a while since I wrote a sort of end of year ErrantScience update. As the name implies I did do these yearly but I had to stop them around the time we switched ErrantScience to the now very popular company strategy of “oh god put that fire out, no not that one, THAT one!”
But I’m pleased to report the fires are out, the ashes have stopped smouldering and there some happy little green shoots have starting to poke up in their place one of them was even holding a little sign that said “this metaphor is pretty tortured, please stop”.
It’s hard to wrap up what’s gone on since I last wrote an update so I’m going to leave that for now and just gesture vaguely at this website where you can have a look around at what’s been going on. But for next year we have much planned so lets talk about that
The blog (this thing here)
As you all totally noticed we kind of wound up the blog a bit at the start of COVID. It was something we really enjoyed producing but increasingly took a lot of work but wasn’t greatly doing very much for us. For example any social media sharing of the blog tended to fall pretty flat where as cartoons everyone was sharing like crazy. But we miss it!
So starting now the blog is back!
It won’t be weekly like it was in it’s hay day but there will be a new post every month and they will still be funny little insights into research and science life. We will also be hosting some guest content as extra bits here and there so look out for those bonus bits!
Things!
God Brexit was a pain in the backside. You’d think a science cartoon and a blog wouldn’t be affected but we were and nowhere more so than when we tried to sell fun things. We talked about it more in the blog post where we closed the shop.
But the shop is now going to re-open as we’ve found an awesome supplier that can solve all our Brexit based problems. We tried this out a bit over the last few months with our calendar and wrapping paper and this helped us solve a few problems (particualrly with the cost of shipping) and now we can re-launch the shop with cheap shipping, good stuff and no Brexit rubbish.
We’re not sure what we’ll launch with so can you please comment below with what you’d like to see us sell and we’ll choose one of the comments as our first shop thing 🙂
The book!
In the coming months there’s going to be an ErrantScience book! We’ve got massively delayed as this was meant to be coming out last year but life happens so it’s now rescheduled for early 2023. We have a few working titles but it’ll be a cute little book of our best cartoons (and some new ones). I hope your as excited about it as we are!
Training and teaching
So we do quite a bit of social media training for universities and companies. We sometimes post articles about it but more often it’s something you’ll see in our instagram stories. This means we have quite a bit of training material that might actually be helpful not just to the organisations that hire us but also to lots of individual researchers just wanting to do outreach and science communication better.
With some help we are now trying sort these packages out into online training sessions that we’ll run periodically that anyone can come along to! We’ll start out with some sort of simple tools for all free workshops but maybe expand into a sort of mini training program. The certificate may have stick people on it.
Also we’re going to do a ‘How to cartoon science’ course but that’s just for everyone to have fun 🙂
Social medias
So we have very recently launch a Discord channel that you should all join, right now. If you’ve not used it already then Discord is super easy to get on with and a great place to chat with people. Our Discord has a section devoted to talking about ErrantScience stuff and then a bigger section for just lots of science chat, full disclosure if you share a particularly funny (or bleak) science story it may get cartooned!
We’ve also sorted out a Mastodon account. We’re not (for now) leaving twitter but it’s current owner is one retort stand short of a distillation experiment and we’d like to be sure that should we have to leave twitter (or twitter just dies) then we’re set up. Mastodon is great so please follow us there using the below username.
If you’ve not seen we’re also doing a lot more video content and content in general on our instagram account so go watch/enjoy that!
Wrapping up
And that’s basically it for now. There’s all kind of other things rumbling around but I think some of it might be best left until it’s ready and I’d hate to spoil something that’s way more exciting if it just randomly appeared.
Have a great new year from myself, Michelle and Sarah and we all see you in 2023!
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