8 ms·
Enough with the dead butterflies (2017)
- tomrod 3y ago{2017}
- cowsup 3y agoGreat post. I've drawn butterflies before (both professionally and as a hobby) and never once realized I was drawing their "dead" state. Nice tidbit that I'll keep in mind for the future.
- ajmurmann 3y agoSo many previous discussion. Here is the one with the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Please, Enough with the Dead Butterflies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37341159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37341159 - Aug 2023 (3 comments) Please, enough with the dead butterflies (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008 - July 2021 (210 comments) Enough with the Dead Butterflies (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 - Dec 2019 (28 comments) Enough with the dead butterflies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 - June 2017 (163 comments)
- geor9e 3y agoSaved You A Click: Butterflies are often drawn by illustrators like dead specimens, with their wings pinned far above their head, when living butterflies do not hold their forewings very far forward of their head.
- xanderlewis 3y agoInteresting article. I think (to take it perhaps too seriously) the butterfly used in designs of cushions, earrings, etc. is more a cultural icon than it is an attempt at accurate biological description — it's something analogous to ♡ vs. a realistic depiction of an actual heart. For whatever reason, we've come to think of butterflies as looking the way they do in insect collections, and I don't think even knowledge of what the dead and alive specimens look like would make me want to draw it any other way. A 'dead' one just looks more butterflyish! I also have a feeling that it has something to do with the (more cultural than biological) distinction between moths and butterflies. For some reason, the latter are considered examples of exquisite beauty and the former usually an ugly (even fear-inducing) nuisance. Drawing butterflies in the classic 'butterfly' shape is a way to make this difference clearer — even if it's entirely inaccurate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _yb2s 3y agoInteresting take. The “over round crescent moon” has also come to be a symbol for the moon that isn’t representative of how the moon actually looks.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThat should be the right take, if it had no other connotations. For instance heart becoming ♡ is fine I think because we otherwise don't deal with raw hearts and they're only part of whole. It would be another issue if used the equivalent of the zombie emoji for "human" or a steak image for "cow" I guess it comes down to how much we care about butterflies, how often we see them, and how much we don't want them dead. I can see why people looking more at butterflies in their daily lives could be bothered, and also how that's probably a lost cause as 10x more people massively never leave cities.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI wish we didn’t have to stain those beautiful illustrations with a giant watermark.
- stavros 3y agoAnd that's exactly why the watermark is there, so your wish can come true (for money).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kragen 3y agoin spanish i've adopted the portmanteau word muertiposa for this phenomenon, from muerto/muerta 'dead' and mariposa 'butterfly'. if you're gothy you might prefer that the butterflies embroidered on your backpack be dead the underground high school newspaper i wrote for was called 'the crucified butterfly'
- franciscop 3y agoI think this must be a local sub-culture word, as a Spaniard I've never heard "muertiposa" and google search for "muertiposa" literally returns me no results.
- kragen 3y agoit's very, very local. my wife made it up, and this is probably the first time it's been posted to the web
- bgun 3y agoDefinitely going to be stealing this now though! :)
- kragen 3y agocc0 ;)
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThere was apparently a debate in wiktionary's early days over how (and whether) to license their content. They ended up licensing it, which seems wrong to me.
- kragen 3y agoa word isn't copyrightable under at least usa copyright law, but a definition can be if it involves enough creative expression, which i think most of them probably do
- jachee 3y agoAaaaand now I have a new pet peeve to put next to Flag Code, driving norms, and the Oxford comma.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 3y agoAnother annoyance of "fiction tropes taken for reality" happens in movies and games, where people have become so accustomed to seeing camera flaws that some start to believe the presence of those flaws indicates "realism"... Even when the truth is the exact opposite--unless the player-avatar is supposed to have inferior mechanical eyes. For example, Depth of field, lens flares, chromatic aberration without wearing glasses, etc.
- thfuran 3y agoDepth of field is a human eyes thing too. Though I'm with you on lens flare and film grain added just as stylistic flourishes rather than to convey "this scene is camera footage". It's like deliberately adding simulated compression artifacts.
- Terr_ 3y ago> Depth of field is a human eyes thing too. Not in in the dumb way games do it: You don't need to turn your entire head to make something come into focus, or aim it with with a gun.
- CrazyStat 3y agoWell, this is a limitation of computers traditionally not having eye tracking. If VR with eye tracking takes off maybe we'll get more realistic depth of field in games.
- bombcar 3y agoApparently one of the issues with VR and “3D movies” is that your eyes expect to be able to focus on anything: but you can’t; only on what the director set everything to focus on.
- strogonoff 3y agoImagine you record audio with perfect fidelity and extreme dynamic range. Now, you have the tiniest and the loudest sounds captured; how do you go about conveying this work? The answer is compression, equalization, all those tricks. And yes, that lowers fidelity, and yes, you will have to make choices as to what’s more important to focus perceptive attention. Similarly with video: many fidelity-lowering tricks serve a purpose. Film grain, aside from conveying a mood, can mask excess detail in shadows and highlights, the detail that would detract from the story you’re telling. A headlight flare can bring attention to the coming car; if your hero or villain is in that car, that’s useful. Panning over a fleeting sun flare, you momentarily focus on the environment and can use it to bridge attention between subjects or scenes. It’s all a complicated dance, and it all exists in time, inseparably from both the immediately preceding material and the larger current cultural context.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- reidacdc 3y agoI love this, it's got that "technical correctness is the best correctness" vibe going on big-time, and it will probably change the way I see that slice of the world. Butterflies loom weirdly large in my life, at one point many years ago my grandmother decided that butterflies were my wife's "thing" (they aren't, we're not sure how this happened), and so for many years we got butterfly-themed gifts from her. It was merely odd, so we just rolled with it, but now we have various butterfly tchochkes around, all of which, a brief survey reveals, are in the dead pose.
- ffsm8 3y agoCan confirm, I could never forget this article since I read it a long time ago and have developed a habit of always checking every butterfly depiction I see if its in a dead pose.
- pooper 3y ago> at one point many years ago my grandmother decided that butterflies were my wife's "thing" (they aren't, we're not sure how this happened), This is a wild shot in the dark but do you: 1. Live near Westminster, Colorado 2. Have had your grandmother visit you several times 3. And each time your wife took her to visit the butterfly pavilion?
- reidacdc 3y agoSorry for the late reply, but no to all three. We lived in Chicago when this became a thing. My grandmother did live in Denver (well, Aurora) though.
- contr-error 3y agoI see dead butterflies.
- yazzku 3y agoMaybe it would help if your illustrations where CC-licensed instead of copyrighted. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/ https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pengaru 3y agoThis is one of those things where now that I know about it, I see it everywhere. People stick butterfly images on all sorts of things, and 99% of the time they're in the dead and mounted style.
- refulgentis 3y agoThat is an utterly depressing brainworm, Roko's Basilisk
- notRobot 3y agoI remember reading this through HN a long time ago, and finding that it made solid points, and sharing it with several people over the years. However, I have wisened over the years and feel that I better understand what is worthwhile being pedantic about. Visual cultural representations of things don't have to look like the thing they are showing (the heart symbol doesn't look like a real heart, emoji don't look like real people or things). That only dead butterflies have their wings in the orientation most commonly represented is a fun piece of trivia, but IMO not worth caring about beyond that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Jensson 3y agoNatural usually looks better than obviously fake, so it is worth pointing it out if you want quality. It is like how fake round drawn breasts doesn't look as good as more realistically drawn ones, but it is much easier to draw round balls than the more nicer real shapes. So for these butterfly images they would look a ton better just by not having perfectly angled T-pose wings. Just varying that a bit and never having perfect angles would get you almost the same pictures but looking much more natural.
- bawolff 3y agoI feel like the objectionable part is not that its unrealistic, its that its dead, which is kind of morbid. > the heart symbol doesn't look like a real heart, As a fun trivia fact, it might not look like the organ but it does look like an acient form of contraception (Silphium) which seems more symbolically correct anyways.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kaijo 3y agoIt isn't just a question of their visual representation in culture. Many major taxonomic works on Lepidoptera only provide illustrations of species in the pinned-out format. This is even more of an issue with moths than butterflies as moths show such a huge diversity of distinctive postures and wing configurations -- tucked up and folded away and overlapped in all kinds of unlikely and bizarre morphologies. I can think of so many weird examples, but to take one, check out this lasiocampid moth I found in Borneo some years back: https://i.imgur.com/auo2t9l.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/auo2t9l.jpeg If you manage to find that species in the standard work to consult, the eighteen-volume Moths of Borneo[1], you'll only see images of a pinned-out specimen, which makes it look like all the others. The motivation for this was to provide a standardized format for the formal visual depiction moth and butterfly anatomy, principally for taxonomists who will be working with dead specimens, and where the actual delimitation and description of taxa is done mostly using microscopic characters. But how moths hold their wings gives very valuable diagnostic information for both field ID and broader questions of classification, that would be very useful to see in a standard reference. This is increasingly recognized and I know of several recent large monographs and ongoing surveys that emphasize including photographs or illustrations of the in situ appearance. [1] https://www.mothsofborneo.com/ https://www.mothsofborneo.com/
- DonaldFisk 3y agoThere's a good reason for it. Although you can see the hindwings on most (but not all) butterfly species when they're resting, this isn't the case with most moths. So, in collections of lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), entomologists adopted the practice of spreading the wings so that you can see both pairs clearly. It might not be natural but it's more helpful for identification purposes.
- Jensson 3y agoIt is like having a collection of human photos were they all T-pose. Makes identification easy, but not very beautiful or natural.
- DonaldFisk 3y agoYes, it's a bit like those paintings of galloping horses made before the invention of short exposure photography showed how horses really look when they gallop. I suppose it's down to laziness - people could go out and take photographs of butterflies feeding at flowers, but no, they just copy a picture from a field guide and hope most people don't notice.
- jojobas 3y agoMaybe it's conditioning or whatever, but I find butterflies more beautiful when dead. Maybe it's about more symmetry and balance so not just conditioning.
- Jensson 3y agoIt doesn't look like a living animal that way. It is a nice icon or image, but not a nice picture of an animal. Although maybe that is the point, insects are gross so humans maybe prefer the non animal like picture of it. Many don't like the actual body of a butterfly, they just want the colorful wings so drawing it in a way that makes you not see it as an animal could be better for that reason.
- jojobas 3y ago
- LuciBb 3y ago[dead]
- arealaccount 3y agoThis is going to follow me like the post about the person that hates fake window shutters
- bombcar 3y agoOr bad kerning.
- Izkata 3y agoButterflies are 3D, this depiction is 2D. Whether it's an accurate depiction depends on the viewing angle in addition to what the butterfly is doing - here's some photography of monarch butterflies, including a few side shots that would have the wings swept forward if it was viewed from behind: https://www.neurotraveler.com/home/2022/9/20/bif-butterflies-in-flight https://www.neurotraveler.com/home/2022/9/20/bif-butterflies... Mostly seems to be when they're trying to land on a flower such as in this one: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b9bf6c9266c078c4008aadb/a65d8d4a-529f-4794-b56f-a6a0c9489b1a/LR-C00080088.jpg?format=1500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b9bf6c9266c07...
- Jensson 3y agoThat butterfly isn't T-posing though. The butterfly T-pose you see in human created images has that black line holding up the wings be perfectly perpendicular to the body. See this for example, they drew the butterfly as a bunch of T-posing sequences, it doesn't look like that when flying at all, it T-posing in one image would make sense but they do it for every image usually which is really off: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/185302115/photo/monarch-butterflies-in-various-flying-positions-isolated-on-white.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=udu8yxaweiz0p87JJbL4oMriV09zLrtIvfnSA-GxZOM= https://media.istockphoto.com/id/185302115/photo/monarch-but...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phyzome 3y agoPosts like this are great because once I know about it, I'll be seeing it everywhere. It'll drive me mildly nuts but it's also like I'm in on a big secret.
- w10-1 3y agoI had to laugh out loud. In the butterfly lifecycle, the caterpillar lives its own life, but then at its end shrouds and digests itself, to the point where only the rudiments of the nervous system persist. Then the butterfly itself grows out of this reduction of self to an egg. In the face of this astonishing life-death-life-cycle, we're complaining that butterfly wings should be depicted in their natural orientation? Butterflies are awe-inspiring, frightening and amazing. But not mainly for their pretty wings. Every living thing dies - yes, even us. But perhaps these words will persist in the internet archive, as dead wings sit in dusty drawers, to one day inspire :)
- darekkay 3y agoSimilar, emoji-oriented posts: - Entomologist rates ant emojis: https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/ https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/ - Which emoji scissors close: https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html - A thread of rating every horse emoji: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832 https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832 - Ranking the "Ringed Planet" emojis: https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817 https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817 - Reviewing Steam Loco Emojis: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 - Talk about Telescope emojis: https://twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267 https://twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267 - Snake emoji review: https://anothertiredmonster.tumblr.com/post/156610510939/snake-emoji-review https://anothertiredmonster.tumblr.com/post/156610510939/sna... - Would you survive a skydive with an emoji parachute? (my own post): https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/ https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/
- KineticLensman 3y agoA similar example is scissor icons and emojis that wouldn’t work in practice (finger holes that would clash if you tried to close the scissors). Don’t have a link now but since I read the article concerned I can’t unsee non-functional scissors.
- ghusbands 3y agoThis isn't fully accurate. Look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUZmkw6YY0o#t=33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUZmkw6YY0o#t=33s to see a butterfly in flight that does approximately manage the t-pose (the camera isn't at quite the right angle, but it's clear to see that the forewings are very forward and basically in t-pose). So butterflies in flight _do_ get this pose, from certain angles.
- tschwimmer 3y agoThank you, I came here to say this. It seems like in many species of butterflies, the tips of the wings come relatively far in front of the head at the "apex" of the "downstroke" of the wings during flight.
- fennecbutt 3y ago"Dead Butterfly" is admittedly a great band or song name
- josfredo 3y agoI bet no one at Bluesky is aware of this.
- jakebsky 3y agoHaha! Pretty sure most people on the team have seen this post, even prior to the logo choice. Speaking personally, it just strikes me as very pedantic point with not much substance behind it. I do get why this post is "ackchyually" bait though.