unreconstructed fangirl

Full grown adult, poet, teacher, obsessive enthusiast. This blog is an unapologetically theme-less magpie zone. AKA @wellofdean, the sideblob where I obsess about Dean Winchester & Supernatural like it's my part time job. I have no guilty pleasures.

[simoneashley]

#bro was flabbergasted New clip from Interview With the Vampire Season 3

[humanveil]

You remind me of a young woman, many years past. You have her face. A sweetheart of yours? No, no, no, a Vecce, above my station. We all jostled for a glimpse of her blonde hair. Where is she now?

[sophsun1]

Parks and Recreation – 5.03: How a Bill Becomes a Law

[the-night-picture-collector]

Yoshinori Mitzutani, Birds

[abramsslinkyvalentino]

Post-Cannes "Famesick" Review

Byline forthcoming.

What has always unsettled people about Lena Dunham is not that she confesses too much but that she refuses to apologize for possessing a self substantial enough to narrate from. The contemporary woman is permitted visibility only on the condition that she behave as though visibility were an unfortunate administrative error. She may disclose pain, but only if she does so penitently. She may narrate desire, but only if she frames herself as its victim rather than one of its active, unruly participants. Famesick, Dunham’s recent memoir and a New York Times bestseller, disregards these rules so flagrantly that the polarized reaction to it was practically inevitable.

The hostility directed at Dunham has always possessed a peculiarly physical quality. Critics have discussed her body as though it were an ideological provocation rather than an organism. One writer notoriously described her as resembling a “big pile of pudding,” a phrase that reveals more about the critic’s terror of that they perceive as neurotic female flesh than about Dunham herself. Male artists are granted corporeal immunity. Their bodies may be ravaged, grotesque, diseased, addicted, even decomposing, without forfeiting their authority as thinkers. The male intellect is presumed to transcend the body that houses it. Women, meanwhile, continue to be treated as though thought itself were cosmetic — as though the legitimacy of their ideas depended upon the degree to which their bodies invite erotic consensus.

This is especially true for women who insist upon writing about themselves. Female self-attention remains one of culture’s least forgivable sins. Men produce six-volume autobiographical epics and are hailed as visionaries of consciousness; women produce memoirs and are accused of narcissism. Watching reactions to Famesick, especially from other women, I was struck by how often the criticism amounted to an injunction against female centrality itself. Don’t make everything about yourself. Don’t discuss your pain too extensively. Don’t insist that your perceptions deserve interpretation. Above all, don’t appear insufficiently ashamed of occupying narrative space. We continue to demand that women attenuate themselves emotionally, intellectually, physically.

What makes Dunham especially difficult to metabolize is that she does not fit neatly into any approved cultural category. She is too earnest to be merely ironic, too intellectual to be merely confessional, too interested in difficult art to remain wholly legible as a mainstream celebrity. Dunham’s world has references to Vito Acconci or Laura Albert that coexist comfortably beside reflections on Taylor Swift. This combination now appears anomalous because contemporary culture increasingly punishes mixed sensibilities. We prefer identities that are coherent brands rather than contradictory appetites. Dunham still belongs to an older tradition of cultural omnivorousness, one in which a person could be simultaneously highbrow, vulgar, ambitious, sentimental, and unserious without requiring ideological purification.

The memoir’s emotional center concerns the instability of feminine identity under conditions of scrutiny. Dunham writes about relationships structured by asymmetries of age, prestige, creativity, and emotional availability. The men in these stories are often less malicious than emotionally illiterate, trained to confuse artistic seriousness with personal neglect. There is a melancholy familiarity to her realization that what she required was not proximity to genius but a more emotionally present, openly affectionate kind of love. Contemporary culture remains strangely invested in romanticizing male artistic dysfunction while treating women’s emotional needs as evidence of bourgeois weakness.

This context makes Adam Driver’s recent refusal to discuss the memoir at Cannes entirely intelligible to me. Many interpreted the gesture as a silencing of a female writer, but that interpretation feels too simple. Press conferences are exercises in message discipline, not salons. To discuss Famesick publicly would have meant entering a conversational labyrinth with no stable exit. Questions about television would become questions about intimacy; questions about intimacy would become questions about gender politics, diagnoses, bodies, aging actresses, manipulative directors, underage celebrities, internet misogyny, and the ethics of autobiographical narration. Any response risked sounding evasive, exploitative, or patronizing simultaneously.

There is also the peculiar burden now placed upon male actors to provide impeccably calibrated feminist commentary at all times. A man must neither objectify women nor appear indifferent to them; neither overexplain female experience nor retreat from discussing it entirely. The margin for rhetorical survival is vanishingly narrow. Driver’s preference for the term “actor” over “actress” struck me less as ideological triumph than defensive minimalism — an attempt to avoid generating still more discourse around categories that already threaten to consume the conversation whole. One can easily imagine the younger Driver attempting to reassure his mother at the outset of his television career with the strained confidence of someone who does not yet understand what cultural machinery he is entering: no, Mom, really, this probably will not involve me being cast in love scenes; I mostly like serious movies where people stare out windows and discuss mortality; there may not even be a love scene; yes, I’ll clean my room when I get home.

The memoir’s portrait of Driver is, in any case, more sympathetic than many summaries suggest. Dunham depicts a young actor anxious about the consequences of visibility before he possessed the authority to control it. One senses his fear of becoming trapped inside a single role, of television reducing him into an object of repetitive consumption rather than permitting the range he imagined for himself. There are anxieties about sexuality, seriousness, professionalism, and audience reception — fears that the show might become culturally larger, stranger, or more humiliating than intended. These tensions unfolded against the backdrop of Dunham’s own emerging instability, her still-unrecognized psychological and physical struggles, and the inevitable miscommunications produced when two ambitious young artists are asked to simulate intimacy for public consumption.

What survives these recollections is not scandal so much as awkwardness — and awkwardness is one of the few experiences contemporary culture has lost patience for. We prefer villains and victims because they are easier to monetize morally. But Famesick repeatedly insists upon the humiliating ambiguity of ordinary human attachment.

Speaking about this book is somewhat complicated, and I suspect part of the sympathy many viewers still feel toward Dunham originates in the particular emotional texture of her work on Girls. There is something strangely moving about a person attempting to document a relationship that emerged in the aftermath of another, seemingly traumatic one among her familiar social orbit, with Adam Driver ultimately cast into the role of counterpart. He was never presented as a conventional romantic hero, nor did the series particularly desire him to be one. Yet the detail I cannot stop thinking about remains the funniest and perhaps the most revealing: Dunham sitting on a kitchen counter eating vanilla ice cream, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she has what appears to be the finest vanilla bean-flecked product in the state of New York standing naked directly in front of her. The scene captures the peculiar chemistry that made their performances memorable in the first place — not fantasy, exactly, but an awkward, hyper-observed intimacy that felt recognizably human.

My first exposure to Dunham and Driver together came not through Girls but through outrage over a Vogue photoshoot. Commenters accused her of fraudulence because the images had been retouched — as though retouching were not the fundamental operating principle of fashion photography. The fury seemed disproportionate even then. People were not angry that the magazine manipulated the images; they were angry that Dunham had entered the symbolic territory of glamour at all. Certain women are allowed to be desirable. Others are allowed only to comment on desirability from a safe intellectual distance. Dunham’s offense was insisting, however ambivalently, upon occupying both categories at once.

[oldpaintings]

Gule rølliker, hvide skærmplanter og brombær ved en mark, 1896 by Emma Auguste Løffler (Danish, 1843-1929)

[honeyandlavender]

A Room With a View (1985)

[beardedmrbean]

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com

I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.

[duttonranchsource]

Kelly Reilly as Beth Dutton Dutton Ranch 1.05 "Peaceful Find Peace"

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[weepingwidar]

Hélène Béland (Canadian, 1949) - Un Capteur de Lumière (Light Catcher) (2012)

[lamplitmag]

🛋️ Lamp Lit 1.4 Spring 2026 is Live at LampLit.net! 🛋️ Thank you to Lamp Lit 1.4 Contributors:

Jennifer Badot

Rachael Bull 

Polly Conway 

Zoë Davis 

Lisa Delan 

Joe Ducato 

Yoonji Huh

Mindy Kober 

Katie Larson  @iamktb14

DS Maolalai 

Kiana McCrackin 

EK Ottenritter 

Kathleen Palmer 

Nina Prater 

Esther Sadoff 

Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas

Thank you all! We are so grateful we get to make this with you! (opening soon for our First Anniversary Issue!)

[iamktb14]

So honored to have my poem, “The Meristem,” featured in this @lamplitmag issue! Much love! 💙

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[ymutate]

Sarah Morgan

'Is it raining where you are? '

[wine-dark-sky]

I was so scared they were heading for a romance subplot but congrats to Project Hail Mary for going for the far funnier option of 'Trolley Operator' and 'Guy She Is Actively Tying To The Tracks'. What a dynamic. Movie of the year.

[existential-celestial]

           The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

— Ocean Vuong, from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” in The New Yorker (May 4, 2015)

[borealing]

star trek is a masterpiece