cui dono lepidum novum libellum?

stage 2 of liking media: haha remember when blorbo bleepus did that thing that was so funny

stage 3 of liking media: huh this one song is kind of blorbo bleepus… if you think about this other song is also kind of blorbo bleepus

stage 4 of liking media: blorbo bleepus is really interesting… here’s a sensible analysis post

stage 5 of liking media: FUCK. THE CHARACTER. THE CHARACTER IM HAVING A CHARACTER ATTACK

stage 6 of liking media: well let’s see what ao3 has to offer!

stage 7 of liking media: everything goes on my character playlist. this song with no lyrics is about blorbo bleepus exploding a building and looking really cool. if this lyric was an entirely different sentence it would fit perfectly

media: well let’s see what

ao3 has to offer!

I'm remembering that I'm not an animator.

At any rate, my cooldown this time around was stretching a different art-muscle, so have a himbo mantis in motion.

Time to start drafting Ch10... as usual, previews will be up on Patreon.

[Chapter 9]

Tip Jars: [Ko-Fi] [Patreon]

Tuesday, Wednesday tread through muck

Thursday maybe eat a duck

It’s Friday, Flat as Fuck

this list is not in any order, and i am not familiar with most of these artists, so an inclusion on this is not an endorsement of anything! if ive made a mistake anywhere, just let me know!

schmekel - transmasc jewish folk band (they seem to have deleted the majority of their music off most platforms, unsure why? but this link is to a playlist of re-uploads)

exiliahu - very vocally pro-palestine jewish trans man

noah finnce - british trans man, pop rock

ellyotto - canadian trans man, hyperpop

jesswar - fijian-austrailian trans man, hip hop

2am ricky - Black american trans man, hip hop/soul/jazz/house

rahim redcar - french trans man, indie/alt-pop

elio mei - american trans man, indie folk

anjimile - Black american trans man, indie folk

the oozes - queer punk band w/ a trans man lead singer

sushi soucy - transmasc, folk rock

dopamine - band of scottish transmascs

boy jr - transmasc, indie/alt rock

great grandpa - queer indie rock band w/ trans man lead singer

riotnine - transmasc punk band

the muslims - transmasc poc anti-fascist punk band

TR sun - Black american trans man, hip hop

billy tipton - american trans man, 1940s jazz star

mal blum - american trans man, indie rock/folk punk

dayflower - british transmasc "dreamcore" indie pop band

ryan cassata - american trans man, folk punk

ezra butler - british trans man, indie pop

bells larson - canadian nonbinary trans man, indie pop

sasha allen - american trans man, indie pop

boy bowser - american trans man, energetic hip hop

mikah amani - Black american trans man, folk music

jake edwards - british trans man, pop music

jakey bake - trans man, super indie/underground

king aiden - Black american trans man, indie pop

addison grace - american transmasc, indie pop

dylan and the moon - british trans man, indie folk

searows - american trans man, indie folk/bedroom pop

elio kennedy yoon - Asian-american trans man, indie pop

beverly glenn copland - Black canadian trans man, art/folk pop

REVENGEOFPARIS - nonbinary transmasc rapper

V3CTORGRAPH1CS - nonbinary transmasc, hyperpop

Um Jennifer? - american indie rock duo ; one is transmasc, the other is transfem

jigsawllie - transmasc, indie "weirdcore" vocaloid music

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

----

1. Being 6’6”

RIP Nigel John Dermot Neill (September 14, 1947 - July 13, 2026) 🕊