puttin on the ritz

which is cool. and it would be cool to say, find a granny square cardigan pattern with 24 squares, knit these squares, make a sick cardigan. but then i realized i don't know how to knit or anything. and once you accept that there isn't really a clear "application" and this concept lives on a screen, you open yourself up to more possibilities. a la birth of venus.

step 1: python script that looks at the original image and generates an excel spreadsheet the same dimensions (793 x 1322 pixels = 793 x 1322 cells), and each cell is populated with the hex code of the color that appears in that pixel of the original image

step 2: excel macro to generate list of every unique hex code that appears in the excel spreadsheet.

step 3: excel macro to calculate the R, G, B values of each of those hex codes.

step 4: excel macro to fill each cell with the color of that hex code (not necessary, i just like to do it).

step 5: I add in Saturation (the difference between the largest and smallest RGB value) and Lightness (average of all RGB values).

step 6: pick a color palette. i always find myself gravitating towards groovy seventies palettes with warm reds and oranges, so i decided not to do that this time. i looked on coolors and found a color palette that was all dark greens that were similar to each other. there were only like four colors or something in this palette. and to make it truly different from the other project, there should be a small gradient. so i determined the smallest possible change between colors and used an excel macro to color it. i was going to stop here and do the entire image in shades of green (inspired by that guy on tiktok that paints using only one color) but then. idk. i realized the "opposite" of each color was an equally subtly changing pink. so i imagined that the end of this process would be an "abstract" image, with subtle variations of pink and green, that would end up suggesting birth of venus.

so all told, i had 502 unique replacement colors, 251 of which are green, 251 of which are pink. (793 x 1322) / 502 = either 2088 or 2089 of each color.

step 7: find some method for finding the difference between the original colors of the image and my new color palette. I use a method of comparing, R, G, B, S and L:

((abs(R1 - R2) + abs(G1 - G2) + abs(B1 - B2)) / 3) + abs(S1 - S2) + abs(L1 - L2)

and you come up with something like this. on the left, those are colors that appear in the original image. across the top, those greens are the colors i'm replacing it with. in blue, that's the number of each new color i have to work with (it's just blue for contrast). and in the center, this pink area, that's a giant spreadsheet with the "objective" difference between each original color and each replacement color. it's pink because i have some conditional formatting applied, ignore that part.

and in this situation, you have some choices to make. in the original image up there, i used a schema prioritizing light and dark--i.e., i looked at the darkest color (pure black) that appeared in the original image, then found the closest replacement color (i.e., the replacement color with the smallest number). then did the same with the lightest color. then the next darkest, next lightest.

but i'm going to do it slightly differently this time. and i don't know how this image will come out looking.

if you look at the "first" green, closest to the left, and sort by smallest to largest:

you can see that these colors on the left are closest to the "first" green i've decided to work with. that might seem odd. i mean, #7F9800--> #00a94f are pretty close, but #A95400 is red. but that's just a difference in hue. really, #A95400 and #00a94f are very similar in lightness and saturation.

and this also calculates the number of times that color actually appears in the original image. that first specific green, #7F9800, only appears twice. but some colors, like actual black #000000, appear something like 46,000 times. and if you add all the numbers in the "frequency" column, it should exactly equal the sum of each replacement color (2088 ish x 502).

step 8: excel macro again. this one is complicated. basically it sorts that first "green" column (column E in my spreadsheet) from smallest to largest. then it adds each cell in the "frequency" column until it reaches or surpasses the blue cell above column E, which for this particular color is 2089. it copies those "original image" colors and their respective frequencies over to another sheet. for the color that surpassed 2089, it splits in two. then it deletes that column E. Then it makes sure "frequency" and "replacement color sum" still total. then it runs again on the new column E, until the whole spreadsheet is used up. and it generates something like:

[color from original image] [number of times that color appears] [replacement color, filled in]

and there's approximately 8000 lines of that.

i have the replacement colors in the order above. starting with vivid green, slowing transitioning to dark green, switching abruptly to bright pink, slowly transitioning to pale pink.

step 9: another excel macro. this one looks at original image broken down into hex codes, then looks at the generated list and replaces each [original] color with the replacement color, that exact number of times.

end result of these macros, following different "rules" of assigning replacement colors to original colors, is this:

which looks different, obviously. but it is the exact replacement colors, and same number of each replacement color, as the original up there.

It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.

No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---

Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.

The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?

No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.

Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.

examples:

Who’s more sexually desirable: Scar or Thanos?

No context; no middle ground. Choose your fighter.

Who’s more sexually desirable: Scar or Thanos?

No context; no middle ground. Choose your fighter.

Because the thing is, most of the time you don’t get the happy, clean, we win! ending of Newsies or The Prom. You get wins that feel like that in the moment, sure. Moments like in Promises when you’ve finally gotten them to listen to you and you’re hugging your friends and feeling like nothing can possibly go wrong now. The union gets a contract. One of the biggest demands you had was met. You feel invincible. Courageous in a crowd.

But then a year later you’re right back on the picket line, because corporate found another way to screw you, or you have to go back and renegotiate for the demands you didn’t get on the first round, or a new problem has come up that no one could have foreseen. And maybe this time, not all your friends from the first protest are there with you. Some of them got too burned out to continue fighting, or they fell out of the group socially, or worse they stopped believing the cause can be won. When progress feels slow and it feels like you’re alone in believing in it, doubt comes in.

Change is cyclical in the way any given cause rotates between action and planning, riding waves of public outrage to make big pushes and quietly accumulating support, raising awareness, negotiating the results of whatever the latest push has won. A lot of the time during the slower parts of the cycle, it can feel like you’re not moving at all, or even like you’re right back where you started. You look back on all the work you put in and wonder if any of it was worth it. Maybe you were just being naive to imagine the way the world could be. Maybe you came all this way to fail.

And you know what? Maybe you did fail. Maybe everything you tried was doomed from the start. But what really defines you is what you do next.

Do you still believe in the cause? Do you still begin to sing fight for it again, even if it didn’t turn out the way you wanted this time? That is the important thing. That is the thing that Hadestown understands so well.

I feel like looking back on big social movements from the past, learning about them in history classes or reading about them in books, they feel a lot quicker than they were. It seems like these fights were won, clean and happy, almost overnight. Even if you’re told the months or years between important major events, it’s hard to fully understand. You don’t learn about the cycle, or how frustrating and exhausting it can be.

Hadestown is so effective as a protest media in part because it’s about the cycle. Orpheus and Eurydice and the workers lose and win and lose every night. But the ending still says that it was worth it to try, and it salutes the birds that sing in the dead of night—the people who keep the fight going even when things aren’t moving fast, even when they don’t have a crowd to make them courageous.