True Facts About True Facts

Six of the zines here and three of the field guides exist because of a YouTube series about animals with jokes in it. Until this page, its author's name appeared nowhere in this project at all.

Ze Frank makes True Facts — nature documentary footage, narrated straight into absurdity, about echidnas and pangolins and anglerfish and mantis shrimp. Ryan watched it with a young person in our community whose special interest is sharks, now studying to be a marine biologist. Out of that watching came No. 32, No. 34 and Field Guide No. 9, which already say who they were written for — and behind them the whole Kin collection, which is the citation-dense natural history end of this site.

So why was the credit missing? Because it does not look like a source. We are careful to the point of tedium about citing papers, and there is a whole page — Cosmic Connections — arguing that nothing here comes from nowhere. But the thing that made us want to write about sharks was not a paper. It was a bloke doing a voice over some footage of a fish, and that kind of debt slips through, because the citation habit is pointed at claims rather than at causes.

This page is the correction. It is filed as an easter egg rather than on the front page for one honest reason, which spread seven deals with directly: the tone does not port. That is not a criticism, and it is not a hedge either. It is the actual situation, and saying it plainly is more respectful than a credit that pretends we are doing the same thing.

What we took from True Facts is not that it makes science fun. Plenty of things make science fun. It is something narrower and much harder, and it took us a while to see it.

Watch where the comedy actually points. It lands on the narrator — his own bafflement, his own voice, his willingness to be the idiot in the room. It lands on human expectation — what we assumed an animal was for. It lands on language — the ridiculous names we gave things. And in our reading it does not land, at any point, on the organism for being a defective version of something else.

That is the same move this site makes, arrived at from the opposite end. Every field guide here has a “sounds like / actually” table, and its whole job is to catch a verdict somebody already handed down — the failed brown dwarf, the primitive shark, the simple nervous system — and take it back.

And it is not that the animals are treated reverently — they absolutely are not. They get called ridiculous, they get compared to household objects, the delivery is relentless. But ridiculous is not the same as deficient. You can find a creature hilarious and still describe, accurately and at length, exactly what it is extremely good at. The two things sit together the whole way through, which is the part worth stealing.

Asked what he is doing, in an interview with Pamela Hill Nettleton for U.S. Catholic in 2021, Ze Frank gave an answer that could be lifted straight onto this site's masthead.

Flawed and wonderful, in the same breath, with no ranking between them. Not flawed but wonderful, which would make the wonder a consolation. Not wonderful despite. Both at once, as a single description — which is very close to what the neurodiversity paradigm says about human variation, and it arrived here from a man narrating footage of a sea slug.

He is not making a claim about neurodiversity, and we are not putting one in his mouth. He is talking about people watching videos on the internet. But the shape of the sentence is the shape of the argument, and this collection is built on noticing when a shape turns up somewhere it was not aimed.

Nettleton's own framing in that piece is the sharpest thing written about him. Her words, not his:

And she catches the thing about the series that most coverage misses: it honours scientists — people generally ignored by most media — and the arcane subjects they spend their lives on. Which turns out to be literally true of the production, not just the vibe. That is the next spread.

Here is the part that made us pay proper attention, because it runs against the way everything on the internet normally goes.

The early videos were jokes with animals in them. Sheela Clary, profiling him for SUCCESS in 2022, is blunt about the first one: it “included neither truth nor facts.” Spliced clips, a voice, a punchline. That is a format that found an audience — and the ordinary next move, the one the incentives all point at, is to make more of exactly that, faster.

He went the other way. He left BuzzFeed by April 2019 and gave the series his full attention, and what happened then is the interesting bit:

His own account of it, to Clary: “I was much more interested in the science part.” The videos got longer and better-researched as his relationship to the scientific community changed — and the thanks now carry actual names: Robert E. Fuller, Dr Angela Horner, Dr Natalie Uomini, Dr Anthony Friscia, Dr Chris J. Law, Dr Karol Zub, Dr Tom Glass, Evan Buechley.

Because it is. This site started with a poem about bones and now maintains a public error log, a six-part taxonomy of how facts go wrong, and five automated gates. Nobody plans that. You just keep finding out the real thing is more interesting than the version you were going to make up, and the apparatus accumulates behind you.

This site is fairly insufferable about going to the primary source. So when we went to write down when True Facts started, we did the thing we always do, and the answer came back three different ways.

So the 2022 profile is right about the animal and, by the contemporaneous record, a year out on the date — and there is an obvious candidate for how.

Which is not a gotcha, and we would rather it did not read as one. This is the ordinary way a story goes smooth — a detail gets rounded, the tidier version is the one that travels, and nobody involved did anything wrong. We have published worse. There is a whole page of ours, dated, where a line got credited to Baldwin that is Dr King's, and a fungal network got asserted because it flattered a metaphor.

The pleasure is just that the series is called True Facts. Its own founding date turns out to be a true-facts problem, and the fix is the fix it would use on itself: go and look at what is actually on the tape.

And now the reason this is an easter egg instead of a front-page piece, said straight, because a credit that dodges it is worth less than no credit.

True Facts is bawdy. The innuendo is relentless and frequently the entire point, the voice is doing a bit, and a great deal of the humour is about mating, genitals and appetite delivered in the register of a man who cannot believe what he is looking at. It is very funny and it is not remotely what we sound like.

The reason the register does not port is not squeamishness. It is who is in the room. This site is read by people who have been laughed at — often about their bodies, often about the noises they make, often by someone who then explained it was affectionate. A tone that lands as warm generosity in one room lands, in another, as the opening of something that has happened before.

So this is not disapproval, and we want that on the record. His register is doing real work that ours cannot: it buys fifteen straight minutes of actual biology from an audience that would not sit through a field guide. That is a genuine access achievement and it is not a lesser one than ours. It is a different door into the same building.

What we took was the mechanism, not the voice. Ridiculous is not deficient. You can hold something up to the light, describe precisely what it does, find it absurd and marvellous at once, and never once suggest it should have been something else. That works in his register. It works in ours. It is the part that survives translation.