1aug2025

We have a colour tinged racism (or at least, racism-adjacent) rant incoming, so if you wanna skip that, the teal dear is that the Technology Connections guy has a fun little video as to why you can't have brown lights. Oh, and today's page rounds out my series on daylilies with eyes.

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After the words for black and white (or light and dark) the next colour term in a language will be red; so I suppose it's not terribly surprising that we have a specific term for a tint of this colour, (i.e. white added) —pink. I read somewhere that of course until orange gets named, all sorts of warm hues get cached under this umbrella, which is why people with orange hair, and birds with orange breasts are historically referred to as ‘red’: once upon a time, they truly were. In a similar way, (green leafy) vegetables in Japan are called 青物—ao mono, or ‘blue stuff’ because until the word 緑 midori came along, 青/ao served for both blue and green.

But I never really considered the origins of two other common colour words in English after light/dark and the six primary & secondary colours (i.e. black, white, and in the pigment based system, red/yellow/blue and orange/green/purple respectively, which as a painter is the system I learned): grey and brown.

Grey is obvious: it's a mix of black and white. Pink I've mentioned. But what is brown?

Because when I do paint I do so with primarily with watercolours (& because I was taught that way) I typically don't use black to adjust hue (1) but rather a given hue's complement. So if I want brown, I could add green to red. However, oxides for browns are inexpensive, so I just buy them, as most painters do. But on those occasions when I did have to mix it, I used red and green (which in and of itself is a mix of yellow and blue). But with additive colour (red/green/blue—the sort of thing you see in an image editing program on your monitor) brown is orange with “black” added. At least according to the Technology Connections guy.

Actually, as it happens, sliding into black (which in additive colour is technically subtracting light) in the red zone also yields brown: and since red is the first named hue in language, it's not altogether surprising that we have specific terms for its tint, pink, and its shade (black added): brown.

No other colour (in English) has specific, simple monosyllabic terms for its tints or shades—the most common that come to mind are all named after things: mint, turquoise, lilac.(2) (I mean there are flowers called pinks, but unless you're a gardener, or even if you are, pink is the colour first, and Dianthus second.)

Where my mind went with this is that I've known (ever since I did a colour experiment where I was only allowed to add white or black to pure hues) that white people are actually orange. Well, now I've learned that brown people are orange too. We're all orange—which if I'd thought about it a hot minute, I would've immediately realized, because the thing that makes brown skin, black fur (or brown fur) is eumelanin, which is black (or dark brown) pigment, and, co-incidentally, a derivative of pheomelanin, which is...orange.

So there, racists who think white people are the be-all and end-all and best, which objectively we're not cuz we sunburn too easily...oh, never mind.

Anyway. Now you know why brown and pink (and orange) all mix so nicely:) And why the complementary(3) turquoise adds such a satisfying pop of colour to reddish orange-brown combos.

Anyway. Have a daylily with a super high tint of orange.

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(1)what in common parlance is called colour, which actually is made of hue, its particular chroma, value, its lightness or darkness, and intensity, which its purity.

(2)Also in the category of colours named after fruit, we have peach, which I'd argue only really became popular as a term specifically for a tint of orange (at least in mainstream American English—I have no idea about other countries’ versions) after Crayola rebranded it from ‘flesh’. And of course actual mammalian flesh, is, um, red. Thus my argument that white people really don't like to be called orange. They'd rather be called a synonym for meat—ugh!

(3)Complementary, in this context, means the hue across the colour wheel. Green is red's complement (& vice versa), blue is orange's—therefore green-blue is reddish-orange's.

31jul2025

If the five gallon bucket in my driveway is to be believed, we've received 6 inches of rain in the last 12 hours; certainly the basement has water backing up the drains and oozing through the less dense concrete, which says to me the ground is pretty waterlogged. Soft soil means pulling weeds is so much easier:) —Normally by the beginning of July, let alone its end, I'd be deep into watering, trying to keep everything alive through the dry months, so I'm deeply grateful I get to do the much preferred weeding—after all, weeds make free compost, but water costs money. All that rain also means that besides tons of ferns and lots of blooms, the frogs have made a reappearance after a three year hiatus.

Currently I mostly have phlox, black eyed susans (two cultivars, but mostly the now deprecated goldsturm: I just put up with the angular leaf spot this cultivar typically develops later in the season), lots and lots of Queen Anne's lace, which I know is an invasive, but it surely has been attracting swallowtails, with the tail end of the daylily season and some Joe Pye weed; in back, astilbes. IOW, pretty but not especially showy, and since I've only got the one page on Storm Shelter, I thought I'd make another of this rather dramatic flower.

Enjoy.

29jul2025

Oh hi all—or, if you like, おはいお (O ha-i o, good morning:)

As I did last year, I went to Japan for a month in the spring, and which means now the garden has had two years to get wildly out of control during its prime growing season. I've been playing catch up ever since, not helped by assorted kayaking adventures, though the latest, a week long trip to the Apostles, was cancelled by thunderstorms and a lot of rain, leaving me at slightly loose ends. Plus, as ever, linkies have been piling up, and I wanna clear out those tabs. So here we are:

First up an illusion of rectangles and circles. Called the coffer illusion for its similarity to the fancy ceiling treatment, it took me an embarrassingly long time to see the alternate interpretation, though this is typical for folks living the US or UK. But after thinking about it for a bit, I realized I was directed to the rectangular aspect not only because of living in a society dominated by rectangles, but also because I tend to read images from left to right—that is, sideways. The other, circular aspect was easier to perceive when I switched to vertical scan (its “lines” were up and down, rather than the “side to side” of the rectangles), which made me wonder how somebody in a culture with a lot of rectangular buildings but a bias towards vertical scanning, i.e. Japan, would have an easier time, as a great deal of written material is still printed vertically.

Speaking of 日本、Yano Toshitaka's adorable お見合いにすごいコミュ症が来た (Ominai ni Sugoi Komyushou ga Kita) which loosely renders to A Girl Woman Who Really can't Communicate Showed up to My Marriage Meeting. Super sweet and silly, just the sort of thing for lovers of shy, awkward protagonists, and—a bit—a Beauty and Beast story in which the disguised character is female:) Right up my alley, I loved it.

Don't put house spiders outside, they're not set up for it. —Turns out they're descended from cave spiders, and are now adapted to living indoors, where they happily consume all sorts of creepy crawlies. I leave mine alone, except when they drop from the hood into my torch flame, that's super distracting when I'm trying to make beads...

Dude retired with 33K savings in his 401K and couldn't be happier.

This is the linkie that brought the page to a screeching halt, (it was created over 10 days ago) and it took me a while to figure out why...

To be sure, there are some a fair number of caveats (but you knew that had to be the case): they sold their house & are living more cheaply in an apartment, he doesn't travel, his wife (who cooks all their food from scratch, & how does she feel about all this? Doesn't sound as if she's got any fewer responsibilities, & can't help I wondering which if any household chores he's taken up now that's he's retired...?) and not least he's able to use the ACA to get health insurance for $200/mo.

Even so, they rent for $1200/mo, which puts their costs already at 1400month, so there's no way he's living on the $150/mo he's withdrawing from that 401k. The dollar amounts from the contribution of his wife's savings aren't mentioned in the article, nor how much they got from selling their home. He's only a year from social security & his pension, and medicare will kick in after 4 years. (Also, their three grown kids are a doctor, lawyer and teacher, and two of those occupations are well paid, meaning their kids could also possibly help out in a pinch.)

So they have a lot of support that likely most retirees in their sitch don't have but...that wasn't what was annoying me. I felt there was more to this bit of bait'n’switch.

Why?

I mean, anyone with sense is gonna know, from the click-baitey title, that there's gotta be extenuating circs.

I think it's the article's lead illo, of a happy, fit looking couple serenely seated at the edge of a lovely half million dollar (at a guess, minimum) home with a huge backyard garden, when the reality is a small, rented apartment. When the reality should be a small, rented apartment! (Though not, of course, the disability that forced the man to retire early—a double hernia that made his warehouse job of lifting 150lb boxes untenable. Capitalism that prioritizes profit over well-being, yay!)

IOW: it's not just that the oversized home and gigantic yard deeply misrepresent the actual circs; it's that the illo betrays both the truth of the man's philosophy, of being happy with less, but it also also inadvertently reveals why his achievement is so difficult, when this unattainable and unsustainable goal is held out as the American (USian) dream. Despite every indication to the contrary, economical and ecological, of how we should strive to live, that moreover is a way of life 99% of us will not ever achieve is still dangled as the default.

Fostering that expectation is deeply corrosive to our national psyche.

(Not to mention that the sort of financial orgs that promote financial planning tend to be right leaning, leading to yet more cynicism on my part: sure, give advice on living on very little more than your social security, all the while supporting regimes that want to cut out what few social programs we still have from under us. Thanks, guys. Yes, you: you kinda betrayed yourselves, there, with that image.)

But that's not the author's fault (mebbe) and the article, however misleading, does have an important truth buried, which is, yes, human connections to friends and family is a whole helluva lot more important than stuff. That is what we should be striving for, and the publisher betrays their commitment to undercutting the social connection in favour of unthinking excess with their thoughtless illustration.

Hence the likely unhealthy rant.

Probably the real issue is that I should stop reading crap on the internet and find some more friends/human connections myself:)

Speaking for frugal, cheap or free classes for seniors. On person was telling me about her local community college's classes on minerals, bird ID, etc. Sounds lovely. Ours is free for seniors too, but alas, is all focused on blue collar careers to get jobs—welding, medical transcription and the like. Bleh.

Japanese scientists built a canoe using stone axes and traveled 140 miles in the ocean(!) from Taiwan to Japan. Considering that I wussed out travelling 8 miles on a large lake because of thunderstorms (and don't get me wrong, a number of kayakers die every year in this region), I was pretty impressed.

But what's meant to be a triumphant tale has a sad coda: the prehistoric canoers made the trip there...but the ocean current meant they likely were never able to return home. I wonder if they knew that was the price of their adventure. (Always assuming any number of them didn't just drown, of course—no PFDs or coast guard to rescue you back then!)

I'm left handed (as was my dad) so articles about it interest me. This one mentions microtubles and cilia, m and I've been seeing a lot of articles about how fluid dynamics and cilia influence development, which was kind of nice to slot this little quirk into. In the end, biology depends a great deal on physics:)

Grey hair (particularly stressed induced?) can return to its original colour.

I love dry stone walls. So cool that the technique is now being used to make art...

Anyway. It's hot, I've been unproductive, but at least the garden has enough flowers not to look just like a weed patch, though I'm not clever enough to capture its chaos meaningfully, so have some pretty peonies instead.

18mar2025

I like all these “minor” holidays—Valentine's Day, May Day—and of them all my fave is probably St Patrick's Day, which I typically celebrate by putzing around in the studio, tidying it up. (And eating corned beef, though I think that's gonna have to stop, I no longer eat meat frequently enough to enjoy this annual treat without gastrointestinal distress.) I'm so behind this year, both with regard to taxes (used to be, I had to file my 1120s by Mar 15, & so they'd be done by now, a great relief, but even if that rule were still in place, it would no longer be effective, since I've decided to dissolve the corp) and the garden, so I putzed around doing those instead.

I, personally, have a good deal to be thankful for, not least of which is all those COVID vaccines did their job, because although my 5 year streak was finally broken this February, my case very mild, I seem also, this time at least, to have escaped long covid.

And, so far, the flu. Why yes, I was dismayed with the FDA's half-assed approach to next year's flu vaccine which I consider just one of the many, many, deleterious outcomes pouring out of the current political situation's effluvia. So. Have a cat picture. We need cat pictures, and whatever other joy there is to be found.

29jan2025

Today I have two omoshiroi (interesting) links and two life hack links:

1. Mount Lyell shrews had never been photographed alive in the wild—not, I gather, because they're particularly elusive or rare, but because their voracious metabolisms meant if you weren't checking your traps of these nocturnal animals constantly, they'd die of starvation. Well, someone decided to forgo the sleep and finally manage this feat, which I think is a pretty cool example of citizen science.
2. The other is using science to examine this magnificent Roman mosaic from Pompeii —I mean, the cords tying on the armour, wow. (I'm not the only person impressed— Jill Bearup made some cosplay armour using this mosaic as one of her references, and wasn't I charmed to see the serendipitous connection;)

And then we have the endless round of how to do household/to-do type $thing which is just clickbait for me, but I rationalize it as allowable distractions because it's not the actively harmful sort, such as making fun of other people's misfortunes or spreading misinformation lies:

1. Tidying in a spiral —this, IIRC, was starting in the perimeter of a room, getting the biggest/most obvious stuff tidied up first, then circling in to smaller tasks—just like laying out a drawing of a live model: start with the big masses (e.g. head/spine/legs, for me) then working towards limbs, then intermediate masses like the rough shape of hands and feet, and finishing up with fine details such as facial features, fingers and toes.
2. Reducing procrastination (a huge one for me—I'm writing this intro, frex, when I should be inputting stuff so's I can turn in my taxes to the accountant in a timely manner). Again, to super-summarize, envision a successful implementation of the task, the consequences of not doing it, then zero in on a bit you can do right now to begin. (There's more in the link, but for me at least, getting started is usually the most difficult aspect of daunting tasks.)

Or you can check out this mixed media I made featuring a tampopo (dandelion) wine bottle sticker.

24jan2025

Way back when, I read the very first Dragonriders of Pern trilogy; and then the YA Harper Hall trilogy—probably in the 70s, as the 7th book, Moreta, didn't come out until the early 80s, and it didn't exist when I started reading these books—these were a huge deal, especially for female fen: McCaffrey explicitly cast them as feminist, and wanting to write sf that starred female protagonists.

Which they mostly do! Books I & II of both trilogies star Lessa and Menolly, respectively, with viewpoints shifting to Jaxom in The White Dragon and Piemur in Dragondrums (Book III again, respectively, of the Dragonriders and Harper Hall trilogies). And, Lessa is abrasive and ambitious, not traits often given to female, especially feminine protagonists in 70s sf. Nevertheless these stories haven't aged especially well, a fact driven home when a) I reread a lot of them [plus newer ones I hadn't seen before] over the summer and b) F2tY and I discussed The White Dragon the other day (and caused me to finally finish this six month old essay & post it:)

F2tY's complaints are pretty much par for the course from modern readers, which I found gratifying, but I thought it might be fun to explore, a bit, what my generation saw in these books (as well the bits, even then, that I didn't like.) Plenty of people have of course cited the rape (and the inappropriate age and power difference between Menolly and the Masterharper, which is specifically what F2tY cited as problematic), but let's just start with regular ole biology, for which I at least haven't seen as much criticism:

Pern was “science fantasy”, ostensibly sf but with the people's spacefaring origins lost in time, their tech having reverted to a feudal system of landowners (holds), dragon enclaves (somewhat similar to monasteries—powerful, rich, and tithed to, but providing protection from the deadly, extraterrestrial and devouring thread, as opposed to, say, god's wrath) and crafthalls. The series starts out with a particularly long interval (400 as opposed to 200 years) since the last time thread crossed over from the red planet to scourge Pern, which it typically does for half a century. In that time, people have come to believe that thread and its threat, has gone forever, and therefore there is no reason to kowtow (or tithe) to the dragonholds.

Leaving aside the difficulties of this setup.... How does the thread achieve escape velocity from its own planet, survive outer space, yet die in water? How, with only a 200 year recovery period, if the stuff was all-devouring and ate every organic/hydrocarbon available, did the trees and other plants, wherries (some sort of bird), and fire lizards manage to survive/recover before the humans came and started their program to protect the ecology against thread?

That is, how did life evolve at all? It takes millions of years, and thread falls every 200 to 400 years! (I suppose the red planet could've had some catastrophic event that changed its orbit after Pernese life evolved, but given the detailed explanation of the ‘lost colonists’ history, what the thread biologically is, etc., from a Doylian [authorial] perspective this should then have been explained. And it never is.)

...Huge dragons flaming thread sounds like a terribly inefficient method for controlling it, especially as the original settlers were pretty sophisticated geneticists; but McCaffrey retconned that problem with grubs that eat thread, but having the descendants misunderstand, and destroy this more effective control, and instead rely on what was supposed to be more of a stopgap. (One reason I consider the grubs likely to be a retcon is that the dragons are supposed to increase in size over many generations, something that wouldn't be necessary if they're a temporary fix;)

Dragons flaming thread makes for great drama and a good story, and despite the issues with biology and planetary astronomy, McCaffrey did a pretty good job at depicting the political strife amongst the various groups, a big part of the series’ success. While the good guys (almost) always carry the day, the villains are crafty enough to give them a run for their money, and what's more, they're reasonably believable villains—old-timers who can't adjust to the way the world has changed in 400 years, exiles ripe for taking their resentment upon the world which hasn't treated them in they way they felt entitled.

But. Despite the lords and bishops, er, weirleaders often playing the villain role, the series fundamentally celebrates a conservative, even regressive feudal worldview. Besides, of course, the annoying habit of male romantic leads being ‘manly’ men who aggressively pursue their sexual agendas (unto rape) the female leads favour the mischievous boys and the pushier men over ‘considerate’ lovers. Ugh. Not to mention sympathetically depicted fathers casually beating their sons to discipline them, another example of toxic masculinity.

The dragon biology, particularly the peculiar sexual dimorphism, is another good example of this: fire lizards (& their dragon descendants) come in 5 colours, descending in size (& increasing in frequency within the overall population):

1. gold queens (female)
2. bronze (male)
3. brown (male)
4. blue (male)
5. green (female)

Size (and by correlation strength) confer status, so only the bronzes are big and enduring enough to manage mating flights with the golden queens. Brown and blue dragons mate green ones, which because they chew phosphine to breathe fire, a habit that renders female (but not male) dragons sterile, means only the rare golden females get to reproduce: the greens (and thus the blue and brown males that mate them) are merely worker bees, ahem, dragons. Recall that humans telepathically bond with the dragons, and reasoning behind this otherwise awkward worldbuilding becomes clear: the weir leader is the bronze rider whose dragon last successfully mated the queen, and, moreover, while in the throes of the draconic lust, themselves go at it nearly uncontrollably.

Defensible rape, amirite?

There's no particular reason that I could see that queen dragons had to have female riders, nor the other four colours all (or mostly, in the case of green dragons) male riders, besides Pernese feudal sexism and McCaffrey's desire, I think, to set her human protagonists up with overpowering lust: the ancestral fire lizards bond to whomever feeds them, regardless of sex, and several male characters impress queen fire lizards. (I note also the baby dragonets’ intense hunger doesn't cause their human bond-mates to gorge themselves...)

The thing that made Pern so appealing to my generation of girl readers was that, since the dragons were telepathic and could teleport, they were basically souped up magical horse stories in which the horse was not only your friend and solace, but also could talk back to you, and since they bonded to their riders at birth, they were your bestie forever. Add the rapey romance tropes going around in the 70s (anybody remember Shanna, which came out shortly thereafter, and had the same sort of feel?) —I thought at first p'raps this blockbusting Civil War bodice-ripper had influenced the Pernese novels but the timing doesn't work out: the earliest ones predate Shanna by a good amount.

I presume that both sets of books actually are spiritual descendents—in genre conversation, if you will—to the original Civil War bestseller, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. One recent essay (that, naturally, I forgot to save) decried the book roundly because it was feminist while also being profoundly racist: Scarlett is, literally, a survivor, but the book perniciously promotes the myth of the kind plantation, noble (white) owners, and cheerful, loyal darkie servants (i.e. enslaved people).

Pern also has slaves.

I mean, drudges. These faceless, emotionless blanks, never named nor even individualized, permeate the holds and wehrs—uncomplaining servants with no hope of education, advancement, or ascension to any of the roles pertaining to the protagonists of these series. But, aside from the uncanny resemblances between the Pern novels and Woodiwiss’ old Civil War romance (I've never actually read Gone, though I've at least seen part or all of the film back when it was broadcast on network television, some 40–50 years ago)—the duels, the honour culture, the rigid class system, nominally meritorious, but in fact highly restrictive: note especially the focus on Ruathan blood (the protagonists of the first three books all descend from this line and it is this heritage that primes the hero for choosing Lessa to be a Queen Dragon candidate; Menolly, protagonist of the next two books, is a daughter of a lauded Sea Holder (lord). She can become a Harper in jig time; the faceless drudges, never.

This focus on bloodlines applies not only to the protagonists, but even moreso the villains: Kylara, a gold queen rider who is a rival to Lessa and especially the less-powerful Brekke (two of the heroines) is punished for her scheming and sexual peccadilloes, eventually losing her dragon and her mind; her half sister Thella is an out and out villain, and her treatment of drudges irrefutably moves them (if, honestly, the term itself wasn't already clue enough) from the servant to slave category:

[Thella's father] Lord Tarathel had even looked the other way when Thella had beaten a young drudge to death. He had, however, taken her to task for riding a promising young runner into the ground. Valuable [emphasis mine] animals could not be wasted.

McCaffrey has a habit of renaming common animals to make the setting more exotic, thus ‘runner beasts’ are horses—and the enslaved are disguised as...drudges. I had, for some two score/half a century done no more than a stumble over the drudges who are to be found in every hold, kind or cruel, but can no longer avoid the appalling, and racist over tones of these childhood favourites. McCaffrey could've chosen to retcon the Southern Plantation inspirations (out of) her later books; instead, she leaned into them.

I can't say, at this distance, whether this was the main reason I gave up on these books: to be honest, the stiff gender binary was likely the bigger choking point (complete with all the main female characters having baybees—frex, three protagonists had their first child all on the same day(!) a painfully obvious way of valorizing the all-important role of motherhood—see, I don't object to some women being super girly, super-moms, or super stereotyped, I just need to see some real life variation, just one childless iconoclast!)

Reading several of these newer books, I felt they were entertaining, reasonably well-written, and...plowing the same ground: not just stylistically or plotwise, but literally, since, frex, Renegades, takes place during the same time period as the first trilogy, Dragonriders of Pern. Thus, for the Pern devotee, these later books by McCaffrey will no doubt be delightful.

For me, disappointing. I should've trusted my earlier self, who managed to ignore them for the better part of 40 years.

Honestly, though, if you're jonesing for magical, telepathic horse-companion stories with romance thrown in, you'd probably be better off with Mercedes Lackey's Valdemaran novels. Valdemaran horses don't, alas, fly (nor breathe fire), but I find I can still read these, albeit sporadically; the oldest ones—set in the late 80s, that is, the same time McCaffrey was writing of “drudges” being beaten to death—while dated, and definitely building upon Pern (to which they show a clear homage)(2) nevertheless were ground breaking for their time in exploring diverse sexualities (as did Wendi Pini's ElfQuest which was nearly contemporaneous with the McCaffrey); in the latest, about the founding of Valdemar, the hero, while still too stereotypically noble to be believable, nevertheless is a) sympathetic and b) actively opposes slavery and fascism. Yay.

Or, if you must have battling dragons (not to mention having racism overtly addressed) and somewhat more sophisticated story-telling, then Naomi Novik's Temeraire series has real, flying dragons (albeit not fire breathing ones;)

I will be so glad when my local library branch reopens, which is finally scheduled to happen by this Fall New Year's Spring? Summer? (sigghhhhh—it's been nearly five years now(2), between COVID and storm damage and abestos abatement and remodelling...) and I can more easily check out modern fantasy:)

And speaking of Spring and Summer, here's a pair of basically the same image—some late season peonies, but with slight different focus.

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(1)My support for this assertion? Well, as ‘Harper Hall’ trilogy, suggests, Harpers, that is, Bards, play a big and high-status role in the McCaffrey books—aside from a dragonrider, it's probably the most valorized profession; in Lackey's Valdemar books, we have dragon Companion-riding ‘Heralds’, sort of a combo dragonrider/Harper:) Not to mention the psychic bond and abilities of the horse-shaped dragons, er, Companions:) Ditto, the wolf-riding Elves in ElfQuest. It would likely make an interesting thesis to compare and contrast these three long running series.

(2)To be fair, it was briefly open between COVID and the storm damage, and we have hoopla and libby. Not to mention other branches, for which there are bike safe routes now. They're ...okay, but just not the same as my beloved walkable, historic downtown branch.