Who was left?

Blog and Reblog were in a boat... (Top-quality Tumblr nonsense, queued to post at least twice daily. Technically a “side-blog” of frangiblekilljoy.tumblr.com )

[konoko]

[aubeebuzzbuzz]

applying for new job:

[reading-while-queer]

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel

Rating: Great Read Genre: Graphic Novel Representation: -Lesbian ensemble cast -Racially diverse ensemble cast Trigger warnings: Reclaimed D-slur, animal death, cheating, divorce, cancer, casual transphobia, biphobia, and ableism, difficult topics ranging from war to AIDS to 9/11. Note: Not YA; sexually explicit

If you’re familiar with Fun Home or Are You My Mother? you’ll know what I mean when I say that Dykes to Watch Out For is no entry level work - though Dykes to Watch Out For is difficult for different reasons.  While Bechdel’s ruminations on her childhood, psyche, and sexuality require a decent amount of outside reading to be fully appreciated, Dykes to Watch Out For requires an equally rigorous knowledge of the political landscape of the past forty years.

But on the other hand, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  The wars, elections, discourse, and protests are not so unfamiliar.  If I had to pinpoint Dykes to Watch Out For’s continued importance to lesbians today in just one idea, it would be this: “Against the sweeping backdrop of history… everyday life pretty much continues” (371).  

It’s not a major theme of the work, yet it is the shape of the final tapestry.  Politics, discourse, trauma, and sickness make their ravages, and here we all are, much the same as we ever were 10, 20, 30 years ago: this pattern, far from intentional, emerges from the tide-like flow of 30 years of comics.  But it’s why Dykes to Watch Out For is so special.  And we have the privilege of going back to look into that reflection of the 80s, 90s, and 00s and recognize familiar features. The political scenery may be different (or, honestly, not so different) but has daily life changed much?

I first tried to read Dykes to Watch Out For as a curious high schooler, and my eyes glazed over.  Without having absorbed enough recent history through cultural osmosis, nor having developed a taste for gray morality, I just didn’t get it.  Two characters would have an argument on the page, both of them would make provocative points, and then Bechdel would refrain from telling her reader which was in the wrong.  Neither character was a straw man; it almost felt like Bechdel was arguing with herself, trying to decide what was right - if there even was a right answer.  I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, especially when the vocabulary and context were both tantalizingly out of reach.

Reading now, I found the once alien discourse all too familiar.  The same exact discussions were being had in 1985 as are being hashed out on Twitter.  One of a hundred examples is whether gay marriage is a buy-in to the privilege bestowed by heteronormativity. Bechdel asks if marriage is a patriarchal model that can be salvaged, but she doesn’t have an answer for you, just a prompt to chew on.

Another example is Bechdel’s discourse on the outliers of lesbian spheres: trans lesbians, trans men, genderqueer people, and bisexual lesbians (Would you believe that term is used in the text - and equally as contentiously?).  These are conversations we are all very familiar with.  However, this discourse is especially interesting in a work that took 30 years to write.  The reader combs through 30 years of metamorphosis in just a handful of hours.  Bechdel’s tongue-in-cheek “Whatever will they come up with next?” is printed in the same volume with genuine consternation on who is allowed to be a lesbian.

Trans women start as a punchline.  But on most topics, Dykes to Watch Out For tends, eventually, to stop itself to re-evaluate.  Thirty years later, one of the main characters IDs as genderqueer, finds herself meeting trans men and doing drag king shows, fights with her friends over their trans exclusivity, and in the end, ends up advocating for and co-parenting a teenage trans girl, who ends up a main character in her own right.  It’s one of Bechdel’s firmer positions on right and wrong, although she doesn’t hesitate to mouth the opposite argument, too.

Plenty of sympathetic characters say transphobic things which just hang in the air, unaddressed.  It’s maddening - but in sticking with the material, I got to see the characters who flubbed the pronouns and complained about gender confusion eventually get in line - changes which are not commented upon and happen so gradually in the thirty years over which the comic was written, that they mimic how change happens in real life.  In our own lives, change may seem impossible, but then you blink, a decade has passed since you first came out, and half the homophobes have come around.  Much the same for Dykes to Watch Out For, which is almost as much a memoir as Fun Home (albeit of Bechdel’s discourse rather than her life).  I think every cisgender lesbian should read it - it’s a powerful antidote against TERFism, not because it lays down the law, but because it meets you where you are and gives you the chance to say your piece without ridicule, before taking you by the hand and showing you something kinder. If Dykes to Watch Out For has anything to teach us, it’s that hard lines in the sand make you look like a dick thirty years later.  Take Sparrow’s story arc.  Mo, Lois, and Ginger are thrown when their friend Sparrow starts dating a man.  They say some rotten things about how betrayed they are, how they don’t know if they can trust Sparrow anymore, or her politics - but when they are overheard, the “discourse” suddenly becomes real.  That’s their friend, and her feelings are hurt.  What else can you do for your friend who has spent decades of her life as a lesbian, whose identity is culturally and socially interwoven with lesbianism, and who identifies as a bisexual lesbian - except love her?

A frequent lesson is that anyone can be reactionary - even the left-est of leftists.  Years later, when Sparrow faces an accidental pregnancy, her friends overwhelmingly pressure her to keep the baby, not because of their politics, but because of their excitement - yet the impact, if not the intent, is anti-choice.  It’s ideas like these being brought to the forefront that make Dykes to Watch Out For something special.

In her introduction to the book, Bechdel frets over both keeping up with the changing current of discourse (XVI) 

…and her own role in shaping that discourse (XVII)

But her work speaks for itself: if we are to do right by one another, we must prioritize one another, not the rules.  The same conversations will be had again, and again, and again, from 1983 until we all go blue in the face.  We can’t control someone angrily shouting into the room (or Twitter timeline) “but WHAT about BISEXUAL LESBIANS?” and the chaos that follows - but we can accept that someone will shout it again in twenty years, and that the following chaos will be so nearly identical to the previous chaos as to challenge whether it is chaos at all, or just the universe putting on a matinee performance of the same old song and dance.  Is it useful to put on your tap shoes and sing along?  Or do you end up hurting the feelings of a genuine friend who just happens to be one of the outliers this time around?

Dykes to Watch Out For is thought-provoking (as you can see, my thoughts have been well and truly provoked), occasionally in poor taste, but mostly surprisingly sympathetic, both to its more marginalized characters, and to its wrong-doers - this comic doesn’t have any villains.  The initial gag, that Bechdel would write a catalog of lesbians like a lepidopterist giving clinical attention to a series of specimens, works to her favor.  There are no bad lesbians and good lesbians.  At least, not essentially.  This approach lends Dykes to Watch Out For more staying power than it might otherwise have had - it’s relatable.  You know these people.  You’ve had some of these arguments, and hurt each other’s feelings over them.  Your friends live in the mildewy house that’s kept at 64 degrees in the winter, where you’re as likely to be walked in on in the bathroom as not, a home where everyone in the friend group feels free to stop by.  

Here in the future, we have the immense privilege of watching how these parallel lives to ours play out.  The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For may be a comic for a different generation, but Bechdel has given us something fascinating from both a history and literary perspective.  She has put to paper a sprawling epic about lesbians growing from their twenties to their forties, getting married (or not), progressing their careers, having children, having PTA meetings, having affairs, and doing civil disobedience with their kids.  Rarely do we see the map from here to there laid out so meticulously.  I read this book voraciously, both the earlier chapters that relate to life as a new adult, and the later chapters, which serve as a window into what life was, and could be.

For more from Alison Bechdel, visit her Twitter here.

[helenvaughans]

while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.

seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.

[vitabreva]

There’s this idea on the right that the libs or wokes hate blonde, busty, conventionally attractive white women. I believe it’s a conviction borne of projection: they hate us and all our beliefs and aesthetics, therefore we must do the same. We see this in the idolization of Sydney Sweeney that lasted all of minute until they realized she wasn’t one of them. We see this in the Fox News hostess/Republican Stepford Wife look. Of course it’s nonsense, I love busty blondes as much as the next lesbian, but there’s this conviction that waving a conventionally attractive blonde woman in our faces is owning us.

Of course it is a signifier. Desire is a product of culture. A blonde, youthful, white but tanned, light-eyed, skinny woman: you don’t need to be a sociologist to see the cultural forces, most obviously white supremacy, which would generate and reinforce that as the epitome of sexual attractiveness.

But with the original, as the OP notes, it was sincere and unexamined. It was calculated, yes, but calculated to sell burgers. Here is the all-American Beauty—Marilyn Monroe, Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson—and a burger. You want the girl, because every piece of media you’ve seen since birth days that is what beauty is and that you should desire her, she’s eating a burger, and enjoying it, almost as much as she’d enjoy you, so now you want the burger! Maybe they briefly considered that it’d piss off feminists or conservatives but hey, that’d be free publicity, advertising for the advertising! Now it’s purely a product not to sell a product but to signify a place in the culture war. “Trump won, chud culture is ascendant, therefore we’re going back to our pre-woke ways! Not out of conviction or desire, but to signal out allegiance to the president and his base we’re on their team!”

The original was selling the American Dream: a hot, juicy burger, an ice cold Coke, getting lucky with the girl next door in a new American made car. This is selling a simulacra, the phantom of the American Dream not for its own sake, not to enjoy, but to show contempt for those you hate.

[sirfrogsworth]

Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn't even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun's light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).

[thefrogman]

Additional Observations

So, I woke up about 4 minutes before the eclipse. I was very unprepared to photograph it in the normal quality you'd expect from a photographer. However, I did capture some interesting details that I thought I'd share beyond the lack of polarized light.

First up... the shadows.

The shadows were very sharp. In photography there is this concept of light going from a spectrum of hard to soft. Hard light has very high contrast and sharp shadows. Soft light is more flattering and diffused with softer shadows.

To get hard light and sharp shadows you need a small "point" light source. A point light can either be very small or it can be very far away or a combination thereof.

In the studio you could use a bare bulb flash to get a point source.

Or you can attach a modifier like a softbox to create a large light source. The bigger, the softer.

The sun is massive, but it is also super duper far away. So it ends up being the smallest point light source available. However, the atmosphere can scatter and diffuse that light, essentially "enlarging" the light source.

To get perfect hard light shadows you need to go to... the moon.

But the eclipse blocked out about 99% of the sun and it reduced the amount of scattered light. And it greatly reduced the size of the light source causing some very defined sharp shadows.

But not *all* of the shadow was sharp. My left shoulder is very defined but my right shoulder is a bit fuzzy.

You can see it on my fingers too.

Sharp on one side, soft on the other.

This is essentially because the sun has been split into two different light sources in two different directions.

In one direction you have a larger light source causing softer shadows.

And in the other direction you have a smaller light source causing sharper shadows.

In photography we have these strip softboxes that we usually place behind a subject to create an edge light.

Only a narrow, small band of light is hitting the body. If we were to use a strip box to light a face, it would be a small light source creating sharp shadows.

But one trick we can do is to turn the strip light horizontal.

Now the light source hitting the face is large as it wraps around the head.

So a long and narrow light source is essentially large and small simultaneously. And depending on the direction the light is coming from it is either hard or soft light.

Destin from Smarter Every Day explained this phenomenon briefly in his eclipse video.

I also think this large and small light source phenomenon affected my lens flares when I photographed the sun.

In this photo it literally looks like I'm getting starburst flares from two light sources.

And in this photo the flares have a sharp bright edge as well as a dimmer more diffused area.

Normally these starburst flares (caused by light leaking through the metal aperture blades in the lens) have more homogenous tines without that feathering effect.

And then I noticed a different kind of flare in my photos—with all the colors of the rainbow.

And each band of color matched the crescent shape of my partial eclipse.

Like a camera obscura, these flares were in reverse orientation to the crescent sun. And while I wasn't able to get the sun in sharp focus, the purple section of the flare is very defined. I think that represents approximately how much of the sun was covered by the moon at my location—about 130 miles from totality.

I am a student of light. That is essentially what photography is. And I found this to be a fascinating lesson on how bonkers light can be. I was a little bummed I couldn't road trip to southern Missouri to see totality, but I am grateful to still have a cool eclipse experience.

[zmpl]

reddit but in the pokemon universe, part 3 [1, 2]

[pokemonheritageposts]

Pokemon Heritage Post

[thatwasthenightthingschanged]

I’m convinced if ppl on this site knew how crappy gifs look before you color them properly, they would appreciate editors more

[thatwasthenightthingschanged]

for context reasons, this is how a gif I used in a recent gifset looks like without any adjustments/coloring whatsoever:

and here it is afterwards:

[5ummit]

I truly don’t think people realize how dingy and dark most movies and tv shows actually are so they can’t appreciate the work and skill it takes to make gifs look the way your brain “remembers” it looking.

Another before and after example:

This gif needed 6 different adjustment layers, not including the sharpening process, which is its own separate challenge. The blue window was also changed to green to keep the palette more consistent and to reduce the range of colors needed, because a wider range of colors generally results in worse gif quality since gifs only support a max of 256 (compared to the millions your monitor can display).

[uuuhshiny]

yeah…

[headspace-hotel]

[missilemaiden]

I always see tags and captions for .GIFs with worlds like “edit” and “my edit” and wondered what edits were even done. Now I know!

[confused-robot-cat]

GIF editors out here showing movie editors how to sort their shit out 

[aorish-deactivated20251222]

Y'know, if a formerly well-behaved straight A student suddenly starts almost not passing their classes and crying all the time and getting into trouble, maybe the default conclusion from every authority figure should not be that they are lazy and simply need to pull themselves together. Maybe instead you should give them stimulants or HRT or let them kill their parents and see if one of those three things resolves the issue.

[iamnotlanuk]

there is no magic "the new generation will be more progressive as the old one dies" btw history has only had things get better because of people who didn't act like it was inevitable and acted like things needed to get better here and now and that will always be true

[iamnotlanuk]

there was a whole generation of boomers who fought for a better world, not as many of them survived as the ones who shaped a worse one. generation warfare is not real. they are not , and have never been your enemy for simply being born before you, and as you get older the youth will not be yours because the enemy has always been the ones holding power and abusing it

[cumaeansibyl]

IT'S CLASS. IT'S CLASS. IT'S CLASS.

Age is a deceptive proxy for class because older people have had more time to accumulate wealth and gain positions of prominence in business and politics. But now more than ever, those older people were born into wealth and influence. And their kids are shaping up to be just as bad, if not worse.

anyway if you've ever seen an old person struggling to make ends meet on the absolute joke Americans call a social safety net you would know age doesn't grant power

[abisalli]

stone cold facts

[specialagentartemis]

well I accidentally got sucked into reading multiple chapters of An Unauthorized Fan Treatise. I am Compelled

[specialagentartemis]

Same, Venmo4nudes from An Unauthorized Fan Treatise

[blogfellout]

I just looked this far into what this even is and, oh, ok, I can’t be allowed any closer to this thing or I won’t think about literally anything else for a week

[generaln0m]

ADHD pro tip: Use psychological warfare on yourself.

For example, in order to do long tasks, like folding laundry, I put on the Mario Hat:

The main feature of the Mario hat is that my headset does not fit over it, so when The Bees™ try to put me back in front of the screen, the headset issue forces me to remember why I put the Mario hat on, and back to the task I go

As a bonus, the Mario hat is also a very clear indicator to my housemates that business is getting done, and they have learned not to distract me when I'm wearing the "goofy-ass cosplay hat"

It's not stupid if it works.

[roach-works]

when i was in like eleventh grade i noticed i had gotten too gunshy about saying things and talking to people because i was scared that they would view me with contempt. i decided that to fix this i would wear a very stupid hat at all times, so that when i would think 'i can't say that, it sounds stupid' i would realize 'well, i already look stupid, so nothing is stopping me.'

i wore this for like a year and a half during a very formative age and it worked perfectly. mean kids would be like 'do you think that hat actually makes you cool' and i would go 'no but it does give me unearned confidence' and i was right. it worked great. i completely stopped second-guessing whether or not what i had to say was stupid or embarrassing because no one could embarrass me more than i had already embarrassed myself. i had a great time, shared a million stupid opinions, and made lots of friends who forgave me my hat.

i do not recommend this method to anyone else.

[swanjolras-blog-archive-deactiv]

i feel p strongly that steve rogers still thinks of himself as skinny

like, he knows he’s big and tall and strong, he’s got mirrors, but i think when he dreams he’s skinny, in the same way you can be 45 years old and dream you’re late for school

steve’s been big for– what, 5 years now? he was skinny for 25 years before that– i think in his head he thinks of himself as skinny, and in his head this all still feels pretty temporary. his body is just a thing like tony’s iron man suit or bruce’s hulk form, except that he can’t take it off; he has a big body, but he is a skinny person

because this was something he did for the war, wasn’t it? he wanted to fight the war, so he volunteered to turn his body into a weapon. and if his body is still big and strong, then the war can’t be over, so he has to keep fighting, and he still needs this big strong body to fight it

but i think somewhere in the back of his mind there’s this quiet unconscious assumption– someday the war is going to end, and i’ll go back to normal again, and i’ll go home

because every other soldier saw 1945. every other soldier saw the end of the war. that’s what fighting in a war means, is that when the war is over, and they don’t need you any more, you go home

so steve rogers is always going to be skinny, i think, in his dreams, in the same way he’s always going to be a kid from brooklyn, and bucky barnes’ best friend, and an artist. he’s doing this other stuff, yeah, but he’s just waiting until the war is over, and then they’ll send him home again

[bumblebeebats]

My family has started calling my cat "the beast" which is very funny considering she's a 19yo arthritic old lady who needs help up and down the stairs. Not to mention she doesn't really meow any more, just sits and stares at you, and im the only one who can reliably guess what she wants, so my parents are constantly messaging me "The beast awakens... I know not what she desires 😥😥" i feel like the chosen prophet of an eldritch god

[bumblebeebats]

Nay, verily... I have noted the position of the stars, and determined rather that The Beast Hungers... for her nightly plate of wet food

[bumblebeebats]

@calamitytrios @shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey The people have spoken

Behold, The Beast

[michaelblume]

I kiiiinda want to go read Animorphs from the beginning but I’m not sure I actually want to read *every* alien-of-the-week book. Is there, like, an abridged list of Animorphs books somewhere for getting the main arc/the highlights?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

No but I’ll make you one.

The thing about Animorphs is that it actually doesn’t have many “filler” books. To get the full story, only about five or so books are actually skippable, but if you’re happy getting only the gist as a sacrifice to cut down on reading, here’s an importance list. Bold-italiced books are plot-critical. Bolded books are very important to understand the full story but skipping them won’t make you actually confused by what’s happening. The other books, I recommend you read anyway to get the full picture, but if you insist on skipping some, skip those.

Also note that this is my opinion; those who see different things as important will give slightly different advice.

Here we go, in publication order (which is the correct reading order; ignore chronologically ordered lists):

The Invasion

The Visitor

The Encounter

The Message

The Predator

The Capture

The Stranger

The Andalite’s Gift

The Alien

The Secret

The Android

The Forgotten

The Reaction

The Change

The Andalite Chronicles [arguable plot-criticality; applies to side characters. Definitely theme-critical.]

The Unknown

The Escape

The Warning

The Underground

The Decision

In The Time Of Dinosaurs

The Departure

The Discovery

The Threat

The Solution

The Pretender

The Suspicion

The Hork-Bajir Chronicles [Arguable plot criticality. Theme-critical.]

The Extreme

The Attack

The Exposed

Elfangor’s Secret

The Experiment

Alternamorphs 1: The First Journey [Non-canon]

The Sickness

The Reunion

The Conspiracy

The Separation

The Illusion

The Prophecy

The Proposal [Arguable plot-criticality; one very important detail is established but it is reexplained where relevant in later books.]

Visser

The Mutation

The Weakness

The Arrival

The Hidden

The Other [Arguable plot-criticality; side plot.]

Alternamorphs 2: The Next Passage [Non-canon]

The Familiar

Back To Before

The Journey

The Test

The Unexpected

The Revelation

The Deception

The Resistance

The Ellimist Chronicles 

The Return

The Diversion

The Ultimate

The Absolute

The Sacrifice

The Answer

The Beginning

[memewhore]

[knitmeapony]

This is no joke one of the most profoundly terrifying things I've ever watched

[nudityandnerdery]

I physically flinched, goddamn.

[chaoticsgood]

he sees you when you're sleeping

HE KNOWS WHEN YOU'RE AWAKE

[fantasmalresplendent]

I can't be the first to make this connection

[fantasmalresplendent]

y'all slept on the first chart but I will make the world see my vision

[finelinens1994-deactivated20250]

whenever a kid is signing up for a library card and they and their parent have good silly vibes i like to treat it like a knighting ceremony. i'm like "jacob, child of hannah, i bestow unto you this card of great freedom and power. are you prepared to take on the literary responsibility of your very own library card? i believe you are." and it always makes them laugh and feel very important it's so much fun. like yeah we do a little improv at the library we do some bits