please try this on for size:

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

Speaking of better ideas, may I introduce you to Housing First

Housing First is a policy that offers permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. Begun in 1988 to address the needs of homeless families with children in Los Angeles, California, Housing First was popularized in the following decades and became government policy in the United States and various other countries.

Housing First is an alternative to a system of emergency shelter/transitional housing progressions. Rather than moving homeless individuals through different “levels” of housing, whereby each level moves them closer to “independent housing” (for example: from the streets to a public shelter, and from a public shelter to a transitional housing program, and from there to their own apartment in the community), Housing First moves the homeless individual or household immediately from the streets or homeless shelters into their own accommodation.

Housing First approaches are based on the concept that a homeless individual or household’s first and primary need is to obtain stable housing, and that other issues that may affect the household can and should be addressed once housing is obtained. In contrast, many other programs operate from a model of “housing readiness” — that is, that an individual or household must address other issues that may have led to the episode of homelessness prior to entering housing.

Because it ends up hurting the same people- and those who already have it hardest get hurt the worst- but it’s harder to stomach coming from people who espouse the same values I do, but are willing to quite literally watch our friends die in the name of principle.

I’ve stopped speaking to 5 of my closest “leftist” friends in the past year and a half because they each each reached the point of advocating that people just die instead of exist in an imperfect system. The issues? Healthcare. Student Loans. LGBTQ+ protections. Healthcare again. The American Electoral system.

Yes. There are massive issues at hand. Working our entire lives, we will probably not see them all solved, and the improvements we might see will break or need improving again.

Yes, there were some shitty, problematic elements from the start (like the goblins), and yes they were marketable as hell, but I’d say the first few books successfully captured some elements of whimsy, and the humor in them hit the right notes for kids. The first few are not great books but they’re also not terrible. (The later ones were bloated and awful tho, imo).  

And of course certain books are published because they’re marketable but that doesn’t mean they’re automatically bad books or lack any entertainment value. 

The thing is she doesn’t have to have had bad books to be a bad person. Someone that wrote some decent books that kids liked can still be a shitty person and we need to learn and accept that shitty people can and do make good art or at least quality entertainment. 

The reason we need to recognize bad people make good art rather than create a revisionist history that every single thing the person has done was terrible, is because we have to be comfortable with criticizing and condemning (and sometimes boycotting) creators even when things they made were beloved to us at some point, even when there was some good or some entertainment value in the things they created. 

I think it’s good to look back at her work with a more critical eye but the first few books were actually decent (regardless of yes, a few shitty flaws like the goblins, and regardless of being super merchandisable). That doesn’t change that she’s still a bigoted dickhole. And we don’t have to pretend everything she created was awful to treat her like a bigoted dickhole. 

It’s argued as if the people who “realized” that Harry Potter was Bad All Along were picking up on some…single big quality that includes both the bigotry of the author and the quality of the story, worldbuilding, et cetera. It’s absolutely bizarre.

But, all of that aside. Holy shit, no, no, no, Harry Potter was not a toy marketing scheme, what on earth, that’s the weirdest thing I’ve heard all day.

The category of children’s lit was on death’s door in the late 90’s. YA was straight up not a thing in the way it is today. Book series still don’t get toy lines by themselves, and the fact that the book-to-movie adaptation of Harry Potter was successful is still kind of a weird fluke. Nobody is publishing a book counting on a film adaptation that can be turned into a toy line, and they sure as hell weren’t in 1997. If that worked James Patterson or whoever the hell that guy is would be doing it.

There are a LOT of series that fit the “capitalist marketing scheme” idea a lot better than Harry Potter (read: Lorien legacies, the unwanteds, wolves of the beyond, fablehaven, wings of fire, that series a while back that was about like animal shapeshifters or something? With a different big name YA author behind every book?) and they haven’t successfully marketed anything except themselves.

Please, not every piece of media that has problems has to have a capitalist conspiracy theory at its core

The real marketability began with the movies, and of course when WB bought the rights they doubtlessly had merchandise in mind - on top of best-selling family movies - from the start. But the first book was very much a risk for the publisher to take (one that the publisher was hoping would pay off, certainly, that’s the idea behind the business, but nonetheless a risk). And there was value in them beyond “giving impressionable kids something to project onto” - not that there’s anything wrong with that per se. Escapism is a value. Entertainment is a value, or we wouldn’t have so much of it. Selling a fantasy world with magic and dragons to people who otherwise wouldn’t touch fantasy with a ten-foot pole is definitely a value, and that is what happened. There are other series which have, perhaps, made more and better of the School For Magicians scenario! But Harry Potter managed to combine elements of magical realism, urban high fantasy and the long-standing genre of the Boarding School Novel. And that’s probably the true secret of its success: it managed to speak to kids and adults, internationally, well beyond the genre borders of fantasy.

And then it got a film (series) deal and all the corresponding merchandise.

Tim Fucking Follin: Yeah I got ya, check this out.

Software Creations: *barely seconds in* Ohhh yes finally, something that isn’t an overwhelming banger. You done good, Mr. Follin.

Tim Fucking Follin: *waits for it*

Software Creations: *ten seconds later*