Heretical Heraldry

On the left we have the caribou, the only deer species where the female also grow horns, and keep them longer than males. Antlered deer have long been used as symbols of power. The supporter on the right is the whiptail lizard. These lizards are famous for having all-female populations which reproduce basically by cloning themselves...but in order to stimulate parthenogenetic egg production, they need to mate with each other. An entire sapphic species! As the crest we have the pelican. Lesbians were big on spreading awareness in the AIDS crisis, as well as providing dignified care, and donating their own blood to help (protectors of the community). In heraldry, pelicans are often shown feeding their offspring their own blood, plus the drop of blood looks pretty badass.

The mantle consists of violets (Sappho often mentioned violets in her poetry) and lavender. On the shield we have the labrys (a historical lesbian symbol), two queen bees, and a lioness for strength.

The compartment represents the island of Lesbos (where Sappho is from). Above the banner are waves. The motto is currently a placeholder.

In seriousness, this is oklch.com, a color picker for the OKLCH color model.

There are whole several hour lectures one could take in color science and theory, but to keep it short: the set of colors we can see, the set of colors monitors can display, and the set of colors computers can model are three circles that only somewhat overlap.

In this case, if I wanted this color

but in red, I could just go of Photoshop and move over the hue slider, getting this as a result:

Which is.. acceptable, but not as "bright" and "vibrant" as the green I had. Looking at the graphs in the OKLCH color picker, we can figure out why:

It tells us that a red with the same luminosity and chroma as this green is out of gamut—that is, it cannot be displayed by this monitor.

In this case, you can use the edges of the graph to find the color that is closest to what you want. You can, for example, keep the chroma but sacrifice lightness,

keep the lightness but drop the chroma,

or a bit of both, which is what the common HSV triangles already do.

Argent, a cat sable rampant contourné guardant, holding a cat toy gules in its mouth.

Where NYC neighborhoods start and end, according to NYC residents.

"

This map was a collaborative endeavor involving hundreds of Indigenous elders and language-keepers across the continent to accurately document place names for major cities and historical sites. The process of consultation and research for the map was a 9-year effort. In fact, the Decolonial Atlas was started in 2014 initially just to make this map.

Nearly 300 names are compiled here, representing about 150 languages. Some names are from the precolonial era, while others are not quite as old, and in certain cases where the original name has been lost, Indigenous collaborators reconstructed names based on their cultural relationship with that location. Because Indigenous languages are living and dynamic, none of these names are any less “authentic” than others. Embedded in all these names are ancestral words and worldviews. However, some major cities are missing from the map because, as our collaborator DeLesslin George-Warren (Catawba) pointed out, “The fact is that we’ve lost so much in terms of our language and place names. It might be more honest to recognize that loss in the map instead of giving the false notion that the place name still exists for us.”

The names are written as they were shared with us, but may be spelled differently depending on the orthography. Note that some languages, like Lushootseed, do not use capital letters, while others, like Saanich, are written only in capital letters. Most names are spelled in the modern orthographies of their languages, but some, like the Lenape name for Philadelphia, were spelled as recorded by early settlers because it could not be confidently interpreted.

In the context of Indigenous erasure, the global collapse of traditional ecological knowledge, language suppression and revitalization, our hope is that this map will lead to more accurate cultural representation and recognition of Indigenous sovereignty."

Few interesting coats of arms of Slovak towns and villages

Map of Constantinople in 1422 by Cristoforo Buondelmonti