we've got work to do

I’ve seen people comment that Pomni’s torture scenario was kind of weak compared to the others, and that it could be because she hasn’t been in the circus as long, thus Caine can’t personalize her punishment as well.

And even if he’s technically using their traumas to hurt them, I don’t think that was his main intention. I think he was “replying” to their criticisms.

Pomni: We think your ideas suck!

Including Gummigoo, Pomni?

Zooble: Pathetic! You’re like a child! What kind of all-powerful being has such fragile ego?

How can someone, whose body perfectly encapsulates their mind and is fully customizable, not feel satisfied yet? How many options do you need? How vain can you be, Zooble?

First of all, I know that Zooble most likely suffers from dysphoria, and Caine focusing the torture scenario on that was a massive dick move on his part, especially when Zooble had shared their insecurities about their body in a previous episode.

However, in that same episode, Caine shared with Zooble his own insecurities.

Caine: Making adventures is my art! It’s all I exist to do! All I am… good at. (…) … w-what you’re saying could imply that I’m bad at the only thing I’m good at, and that…

I’m just saying that he probably took Zooble’s criticism as a low blow of its own and he made it personal.

Ragatha: You never let us feel like we’re at home.

Which home? Yours, Ragatha?

Gangle: You discourage us from thinking outside the box and doing things our way!

Spudsy’s was a hell of your own making, Gangle.

Jax: You lie to us constantly!

poem is my cat is sad by Spencer Madsen

please click for higher quality!

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.

Yes, our optical sensors are responding to reddish, greenish, and bluish light, with peak responses at certain wavelengths and decreasing response further away from them for each cone (“Red”/Long cones also get stimulated, more mildly, by violet light)

But that is not the signal that goes to our brains’ optical processing!

Given LMS+R(rods) sensors, the actual signals sent are (THIS, TOO, IS AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION)

(L+M) vs S: Is it bluer or yellower?

L vs M: Is it redder or greener?

L+M+R: How bright is it?

Human eyes have relatively few and sparse S cones, and they don’t much figure into percieved brightness. This is why it is very hard for you to read blue-on-black or yellow-on-white: The difference between them is mostly detected by your S cones, which are low-resolution and don’t figure much into perceived brightness!

Also, because of that second peak in L-cone sensitivity, that’s why we see magenta as like… more-in-the-violet-direction-from-blue-than-violet-is If we’re seeing not much M signal, a fair bit of S signal, and a little L signal we’re probably looking at something violet, but as the post notes, our brains don’t have access to what the wavelength was, only the sensor response (in turn combined into the channels listed above), so blue light mixed with a little red light works too. And if there’s more red… uh… well then it must be more violet than violet! Like some kind of ultra violet! So we perceive it as such.

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.

i like the idea of him being allergic to mangos. not necessarily bad enough to warrant a hospital visit every time, but enough he suffers for his choices.

i also like the idea that the batfam have to keep eyes on this man at all times when a mango is in his vicinity.

Dick, wandering the Manor with faux casualty, mango in hand as he tries to find somewhere to eat it out of sight:

Jason, sitting in the library: "Hey, Dickie, what've you got there?"

Dick, immediately looking like a guilty dog who got caught in the trash: "...nooothing-"

Jason, snapping his book shut and sitting up: "Is that a fucking mango."

Dick, bolting: "NO?"

Jason, chasing immediately: "YOU CAN'T FUCKING EAT THOSE, GIVE IT HERE! DICK!"

Tim, sitting at the Batcomputer, working on a case:

Barbara, popping on screen: "Mango alert."

Tim, dropping everything to bolt upstairs: "RICHARD JOHN GRAYSON!"

A muffled screech is heard in the distance, followed by curses and demands of "spit that shit out NOW-"

The entire Batfam at dinner:

Dick, sneaking the mango flavored icecream over:

Damian, smacking his hand: "Richard for the love of-"

Dick, snatching the icecream and bolting: "You can't keep me from my mangos! I will never relent! MANGOS FOREVER!"

The entire family chases him down. Alfred is preparing treatment, and Bruce is sitting alone at the dining table, a few more grey hairs, and looking like he regrets everything. Muffled screams, curses, and then a loud lecture from at least three different people can be heard a few rooms over.

I watched Superman (2025) a few days ago and I enjoyed it so, so, so much. And thus, as a small detour from my usual output, I am officially outing myself as a longtime DC fan.

(To clarify: I am not shifting gears completely, sometimes I just need to get the brainworms out. Very important.)