#hoax

Idleness

"I must be idle."

Welcome to my blog!

When the website moved (July 2019) posts and comments of the previous 10 years could not be imported. However, a small selection of posts from that decade have been copied over.

If you like my stuff, read, comment, subscribe to the blog. You'll find blog posts on a variety of subjects, but since I'm an author it's perhaps not too surprising that there's a fair number of posts about writing, books, and authors. No book reviews, though: they're on my Patreon, along with other bookish posts and more behind-the-scenes posts about my books and characters, as well as large amounts of fiction every month.

Ainy Rainwater

Feb 22, 2012
5 min

Do You Believe in Monsters? How About Woolly Mammoths?

I'm always happy when a new episode of the Monster Talk podcast pops up in my podcast feed. The new one deals with the recent Wooly Mammoth hoax, but I’d like to talk a bit about why people often believe. I learned a new word today: pareidolia. Maybe I’ve heard it on previous episodes, but it really struck me today. It refers to the mind forming a pattern out of something random, such as when we see an image but can’t clearly tell what it is, our mind will try to fill in with