The artist known as HP Bugsy slips a brightly colored piece of plastic onto a steel bollard, as subtly as a spy, on his way into a Pflugerville park. It lands with a quiet clack.

Like most of his creations, it looks kind of like a lightning bug, with big, friendly eyes, a crinkly antenna, and a rounded bottom. This latest version has the aesthetic of old-school spray-painted graffiti tags, drips and all. The plastic doodad sticks on the post because Bugsy, who produces his work on a 3D printer tucked inside his home office’s closet, embeds the bugs with magnets.

For the past five years, Bugsy has been placing the bugs anonymously around the Highland Park neighborhood of Pflugerville , a once tiny town just north of Austin whose population is now zooming toward 70,000.

What started a

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