you are full of beautiful things

But what does “purple skills are specialized for purple work” have to do with this? Obviously purples in the skilled trades have spent years learning to be carpenters or plumbers or clockmakers (<3), and those people are doing well enough that they have no reason to leave their careers for web development. It’d be bad to create a situation that incentivized them to do so, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Voa has a large surplus of purple labor. It’s important to remember that a lot of purple work is not skilled labor; it doesn’t take a long time to learn to be a cashier or a janitor. Unskilled purples have a comparative advantage in these jobs only because they don’t have other options, and if a few of them leave for other work, there will be plenty of other purples waiting to take their places. 

There are, of course, other ways to solve the imbalance. Voa could pursue large-scale swaps between Voan purples and foreign yellows, but there are really very few places in the world with a shortage of purples and a surplus of yellows. It’s doubtful that it would be enough to correct the imbalance. Alternatively, Voa could deny purples the two children they’ve been promised, and offer additional children to yellows. If the imbalance were bad enough, then this might be on the table, but it would be hugely disruptive, much more disruptive than recasting a few occupations. Given this, recasting a few occupations seems like a more sensible second-line response.

Obviously, I don’t think this means that we should just open arbitrary jobs to purples. Purples should be directed towards the jobs that are most suited to their capabilities. Capabilities, mind you, not skills - skills are teachable, and anyone from any caste can develop them. 

Whether web development in particular is a good field to direct purples to relies on two questions.

One, are purples are capable of the sort of logical reasoning capabilities necessary to do basic web development? I think the answer to this is obviously “yes”; the purple caste includes mechanics, electricians, and civil engineers, who are all clearly using similar logical reasoning capabilities (not to mention lots of hobbyist web developers). 

Two, are their capabilities close enough to those of yellows that any decrease in the quality of Voan web development will be offset by the increased productivity of yellows in other areas (ie, do purples have a comparative advantage in web development)? This I’m less certain of, but I think it’a another “yes”, and I even think that the quality of web developers may ultimately go up - there are a lot more Voan purples than Voan yellows, which means a larger pool of competition. Web development would also be a very high-paying career choice for purples, so purples will compete for web development jobs, while yellows mostly don’t need to.

Castes are not skill sets. They are economic and cultural divisions that exist to give us the structure and sensible division of labor necessary for a stable and prosperous society. They exist to ensure that all necessary work continues to be done by people who are prepared to do it, and if they stand in the way of that, we can and should change their boundaries in relatively non-disruptive ways.

This Unkind Season, a science fiction series chronicling the development of a near-future colony planet. Following a plague that kills most of the colonists, the remaining population is forced to rebuild with limited resources and limited contact with Amenta. 

Song of Zenmarel, an early-medieval fantasy series that alternates between narrative epic and interludes taken from fictional historical documents. Concerns a magical tailor who undertakes a forbidden quest to raise his only child from the dead, becoming embroiled in foreign politics in the process.

Of Hunger, a locative epic focused on the Voan city of Alar Nar during the food crisis. Probably the most traditional thing I’ve written.

The first few chapters of all three works are available on the Overmorrow Studios website, a new fiction network spearheaded by Arvan-born Voan Elden be-Ta’yes, which aims to make it easy to support both green and non-green authors without resorting to traditional anti-piracy measures. New chapters are set to be released as funding milestones are reached (mine are currently set to 200 noavo per chapter), and are afterwards free to read and distribute to everyone. Non-greens can easily make sure that the majority of the money they earn goes to charities of their choice (money from my stories goes to Clean Hands, the Sul Arin Research Hospital, and the Voan Center for Astronomical Research). 

This is Kanamar, the protagonist of Song of Zenmarel. The dollmaker I used didn’t have any good way to make him holding fabric, so I tried to draw some in, but it didn’t really work very well. I thought it was really interesting how his clothing changes as he gains social status, not just to give him fancier clothing, but to make the colors fancier as well, since dye was more expensive back then.

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small

Wait wait, what?  Last I heard, you weren’t even seeing anyone!  Clearly there have been some intermediary steps we haven’t heard about, but no wonder, it sure sounds like it’s been eventful for you for a bit!

I really didn’t think this time last year that I was anywhere near ready to have a child - I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, and it seems irresponsible to marry someone without spending a pretty significant amount of time with them beforehand, so I figured it wouldn’t happen for a long time yet, if it ever happened at all.

But then I ran into my husband! Ran into him for the second time, actually, which is a lot of why I decided it was OK to do this so quickly; we knew each other back when I was living with Magraz and Tuyi, and then lost touch when I went to the moon. It was really pretty coincidental that we ran into each other again a couple seasons ago, but we were both finally in a position to make a relationship work, and he HAPPENS to be amazing and adorable and kind and intelligent and generally excellent, but also to have dubious enough taste to fall in love with me. :P

So now we’re married, and we’re going to have the first of two children this year. And they’re going to be wonderful. <3

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small