Emily Damstra is an illustrator whose post argues that illustrators should stop drawing dead, pinned butterflies instead of living ones.
HN links it whenever artwork shows butterflies in a dead pose, treating it as the reference for that criticism.
Similar posts:
- Ants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17555842
- Smiling faces: https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/
- Butterflies: http://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
- Trains: https://mobile.twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790
- Horses: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832?lang=en
- Planets: https://mobile.twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817
- Telescopes: https://mobile.twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267
- Parachutes: https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/
- Chickens: https://www.tumblr.com/ub-notactive/176663342440/reviewing-and-rating-the-chicken-emojis
- Snakes: https://anothertiredmonster.tumblr.com/post/156610510939/snake-emoji-review
I'm looking through https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/illustrations and all the illustrations seems to be of non-dissected animals/insects, at the illustration themselves. Of course, impossible to know if the illustration was drawn from a dead or alive specimen, but none of them seems based on anything picked apart as far as I can tell.
As an example, all the drawn butterflies seems to be drawn as if they were alive, not dead (https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/).
> The drawing shows the long tentacles as you could see them on a dead cuttlefish. As I have said, in the living cuttlefish you can see them only for a fraction of a second
Yeah: stop drawing dead butterflies https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
Once you've seen the pattern, you see the same issue with other art. I bought a biology style painting because I liked the intentional dead-animal style (both a bird and some insects).
I really enjoyed this. It is very similar to "Please, enough with the dead butterflies!" [0] I'd like to see a list of everything like this. Similar to Awesome falsehood [1] but not quite.
0: https://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ ( HN 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 HN 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 )
1: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Unrelated to engineering but the recent rebrand to a dead butterfly logo[1][2][3] may be off brand for a platform wishing to communicate a more open, social Internet built on first principles and scientific rigor.
[1]https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013
[3]https://bsky.social/about/blog/12-21-2023-butterfly
It's a little hard to tell because the butterflies are flapping and rotating, but I think your algorithm is sometimes generating dead butterflies.
https://emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/