SHARD #608,779 (THE PAINTER)
It was a perfect world.
Mostly perfect. Perfectish. Perfection-adjacent, at the very least. But after all the centuries, the town he'd come to call home was starting to feel just a little bit drab. Inspiration for his work came grudgingly, or worse refused to come at all. And so it was one morning that he rose before the sun and trekked up to the peak of the nearby mountain, easel strapped to his back, and set himself up at the edge of a cliff just as the first rays of the dawn began to peek above the horizon. Below him, the town was entirely shrouded in fog, only the faintest gray outlines visible in the low light. Soon it would burn off, and the stallion fully intended to be finished with his painting by the time it did.
The stallion turned a critical eye from the canvas to his paints. Without the right palette the entire enterprise was futile and he'd be right back where he started. After a moment of consideration, he grabbed a tube of green. Another moment, and he decided to mix in some red as well. And of course, he would need plenty of splarge.
He smiled. Great color, splarge. The first entirely original creation he'd come up with after he'd emigrated. Condensing the smell of an oncoming thunderstorm into just its visual essence had been worthy of a brand new cutie mark; a color wheel mapping out all the transitional hues as orange turned to zivgult turned to purple turned to wulk turned back to orange once again.
Not many shards could brag about having their very own colorsmith. Somepony wanted to paint their nursery the color they felt when the pregnancy test finally came back positive? He could have four gallons of it ready by Wednesday. They wanted a scarf or hat the color of biting into their favorite food prepared by a master chef? He'd call the tailor by the end of business tomorrow with the specifics. There were always new requests and new challenges to rise to, and the stallion had yet to disappoint even a single customer.
Coating the bristles of his paintbrush, he made quick outlines of the town's major landmarks and building. That was the easy part, of course, and once he'd completed a reasonable if somewhat abstract framework the real test began. The fog would burn off within the hour, so there wasn't much time to give extensive thought to the piece. Instead, he just trusted in his intuition to guide the colors flowing across the canvas as he worked. The brown stonework of the cathedral would really look better in a pale dharvax, wouldn't it? And with spring on its way, he gingerly pecked the tip of the brush on the verdant green fields, leaving dozens of pink and faquarlic blossoms springing to life across the countryside. He'd never really liked the black shingles that covered his roof, either. They left the house awfully hot during the peak of the summer. On a whim, he decided it would look so much better as a bright and garish yuxrum with yellow accents along all of the gutters. He managed to slap the final touches on the canvas just as the fog over the valley below started to lift.
The stallion looked out over the town, then back at his canvas. It all matched, from the dharvax arches framing the cathedral's stained glass windows to the yuxrum roof of his home off in the distance. A vast improvement, in his professional opinion, over what it had looked like when he'd gone to bed the night before.
Even as he took the canvas off the easel and rolled it up, he felt a wealth of new ideas already welling up in his mind. Not a moment too soon, either; his latest project was proving a formidable challenge. He wondered if the mare it was meant for was even awake yet. Probably not; she wasn't much of a morning pony, but that suited him just fine. He'd have to remember to pour a bit of that into the deceptively simple bottle of mane dye sitting in the middle of his workshop, soon to be wrapped up in an equally plain box and planted among a pile of birthday gifts until the moment was right. The new tweaks would complement the way her feathers tickled his side when she leaned into him for warmth on deep, snowy nights, but if he wasn't careful it might drown out the shade of her laughter at some unbearably corny joke he told. And of course, he didn't want to divert too much focus from the bright sensation of realizing that even with an eternity to be with her, he couldn't conceive of ever growing numb to her presence in his life.
Of all the colors he'd ever mixed, love was proving one of the trickiest to capture. But as he trotted down the hillside back towards the town, he was pretty sure the final product would be worth the effort.
It was a perfect world.
Holy crap, inventing new colors? Just trying to picture that makes my mind hurt.
I really liked this one. It showcased something that just isn't possible in the real world. At least, not without the soul of a poet and the eyes of a mantis shrimp.
5439880 I've often tried to imagine what colors beyond our range of experience might look like... needless to say, I've not had much luck. XD
Inventing colors that have additional components? Capturing a smell as a color? Or a feeling? Or an idea? What is that, when you see the color do you experience the other sensations with it? Very trippy, in fact perhaps the definition of trippy with chemicals like LSD which remove the boundaries between sensations such that you could taste purple, hear happiness, smell love.
coughcough
Anyways, seems a much nicer world than the last couple. I wonder how this would read to a blind person?
Beautiful.
Absolutely beautiful.
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I already did the blind pony chapter. Maybe something with smells that inject memories directly into the mind would be comparable.
Anyway, standardized the typo to the former spelling as it's slightly more fun to say.
5439894
I've thought about this sort of thing quite a lot, partly for work reasons. The part that I've been wondering about is what the consequences of having more colours would be for how a being would perceive "colour harmony", for lack of a better term.
As far as I can tell, the main consequence would be that it would be much harder to find colours that look nice next to each other. "Hue" winds up having far more degrees of freedom than the single degree we're used to.
Another consequence is that once you have more than a small handful of receptor types, every colour seen in nature would be its own special snowflake, rather than different objects having colours that are similar to each other. The only easy way to make paint the colour of tree leaves would be to make that paint out of tree leaves (from the right type of tree). A high-tech (or high-magic) society could overcome this, but it would have interesting consequences for the directions visual art would take when it evolves in the first place.
The math is nifty too, but that's mostly my inner Twilight talking .
Eakin's certainly done a good job of showing one way that "new colours" might be used on a more personal level. Between this and the "blind pony" chapter, it'll be interesting to see how he decides to top it .
This is probably one of my most favourite shards you have shown. Thank you for sharing!
5440200 As I understand it (and I have nothing in the way of formal education here, so I could be wildly wrong), complementary color theory is highly dependent on our perception of color, which is in turn entirely, or very nearly so, dependent on the physiology and neural wiring of our vision. For example, the fact that there are three primary colors as we perceive them is an artifact of the three types of color receptors in our eyes; if we had more types, keyed in to different wavelengths of light, we would perceive more primary colors. The really interesting thing, to me at least, is that the visual wiring in our brains isn't specific to the wavelengths of light our retinas can collect; I recall reading a story about a man who had the lenses of his eyes replaced with artificial lenses, and subsequently reported that he could see slightly further into the ultraviolet spectrum; this was confirmed by testing with a device that adjusts the wavelength of emitted light in 10-nanometer increments (our natural lenses, as it turns out, filter out ultraviolet wavelengths of light that our receptors could otherwise detect). This implies that if we develop artificial eyes/retinas allowing us to see far into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, our brains will be able to interpret the visual information straight out, which in turn suggests that our current concept of complementary color schemes wouldn't be too much different, just potentially expanded somewhat.
Actually birds have FOUR color dimensions as opposed to our THREE and most other mammal's TWO. So if you wanted to know, ask a bird, or see like a bird. Maybe one day we will be able to.
5440297
Definitely happier with it than my original plan for this shard. Was originally going to be a pony who was sick of his shard, so he goes out and paints a portrait of a new and completely alien world. Then right at the end of the chapter he steps into the painting itself, the world he imagined a brand new environment to explore.
That languished for a while, but when the idea of 'colorsmiths' slipped into my head I decided that it was too cool a piece of world building (shard building?) to pass up.
5440403 I've also read about people who associate sights with sounds naturally, so for example when they hear the letter 'a' they see the colour red in their mind. And sometimes they see impossible colours that humans cannot normally perceive, such as stygian blue or (hopefully) yumrux.
5440403
I'm talking about a different scenario: one in which we have more than three "primary colours" (_many_ more than three, in the limiting case). As silvadel notes, there are animals that have a few more (birds and insects can detect polarization, and insects can detect UV), but there's a big difference between "I see four to six primary colours" and "I am an imaging spectrometer".
The idea of "contrasting colour" and "complementary colour" only work nicely if hue has a single degree of freedom (position on the ring we call the "colour wheel"). Depending on which version you're using, the colour directly opposite you is either contrasting or complementary, and you can move about 60 degrees off to find the others.
If you have four receptors, your "colour wheel" is the surface of a sphere, with two degrees of freedom (with saturation and value being the other two degrees; math available on request). You _could_ declare that the colour opposite you on the sphere is the "complement" and declare the vertices of some polyhedron to be where "similar" and "contrasting" colours are, but it's not obvious to me that that would actually work (that is, whether these would "feel right" to someone who actually saw that way).
Things get even murkier when you have a very large number of colour channels that are densely spaced. If you only have a small number widely spaced, the components in any given pigment might not be strongly linked, but if you're using an imaging spectrometer, that stops being true. The 650nm red-1 signal and the 630nm red-2 signal will be quite close for most things you're looking at... except for the handful of things that have a notch or a cutoff in the spectrum at that point. Beings that perceive that way might not deal with individual wavelengths at all, but instead with spectral features (lots of fun sci-fi could be written about that). At that point, our ideas of "contrasting colour" and "complementary colour" stop making sense almost entirely.
Long story short, with alien ways of perceiving colour will come alien ways of thinking about colour, and I'm not entirely sure what those ways would be. It's certainly fun to guess, though.
(Before anyone mentions tetrachromat humans - the two "green" channels are close enough that they'll for the most part be psychologically considered the same thing, so the colour wheel will still mostly make sense for a tetrachromat except for certain very specific pigments with a strong change in response in exactly the wrong place. The green response is actually mushy enough that even those might not look too different; the only reason we see "green" at all is because we subtract out the red portion of this broad response.)
5440627 Yep, that's synesthesia; I've always been fascinated with it myself. As for perceiving impossible colors, I've read about specially-crafted pictures that allow you to see such things as a red-green color if you view them in a certain way, though I can't remember what this is called off-hand. (The idea of the color red-green is interesting in its own right, because it's normally doubly impossible for us to perceive: first, because we have separate red and green photoreceptors, light with both red and green wavelengths activate them separately, and second, the information about detected light that our retinas pass to our brains is passed through several filters before further processing, one of which is a red-green filter which prevents a specific area from appearing both red and green.)
5440651 I'll acquiesce to your expertise here; it's quite obvious that unlike me, you actually know what you're talking about. If I had any valid points at all in my original reply, you rightly noted that they weren't on the same topic you were originally discussing.
Huh. A chapter that was all cheery and nice. Don't remember the last time we had one like that.
Request: story in which the protagonist is a perfectly normal-seeming pony who spends his day going on service calls to the homes and businesses of also perfectly normal-seeming ponies.The first stop is maybe at a restaurant. The owner gratefully thanks the protagonist for showing and explains that there's an obviously malnourished dog who's been begging for food, and that he's terribly concerned about that, and really hopes the protagonist can take care of him. Cue kindly and gently calling to the dog who comes running up and affectionately licks and nuzzles him and accepts pets and hugs. Then the protagonist shoots the dog dead, and the restaurant owner thanks him with a tremendous sigh of relief.
A few more stops, and at every one there's a dog. Happy, loving, friendly, affectionate. Not just strays. Obvious pets and children's and neighbor's dogs too. And every time he slaughters them amidst bloodily dissonant appreciation and sighs of relief.
Finally, he returns home, hangs up his coat, sits in his chair and listens over the town from his bedroom windows.
Absolute silence.
It was a perfect world.
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Never gonna happen. Been a dog person since I was about nine.
5440810 Thanks, dude -- fellow dog person.
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You had valid points, don't worry!
What you describe is pretty much how false-colour displays work; lots of very nifty astronomy pictures are mapped into human colour-space that way.
(You can do similar things to map ultrasound/infrasound into human hearing range, but I can't point to any examples of that off-hoof.)
This was rad (as always for this series). The conceit here is a particular example of both what kind of potential Equestria Online has as a setting, and why we can't really claim a "realistic" take on it for anyone who's been uploaded for any length of time (much like singularity-centric SF in general). Still, I'd like to see more dream-logic EqO.
This was amazing, as a chapter... ... oh man, imagine someone with synesthesia finding this shard...
5441016 I'm not worried, I'm just acknowledging that you carried the conversation well out of my area of competence, and I know better than to try to fake it, especially when my interlocutional partner is an expert in the topic of discussion. That being said, I also don't want it to sound like I'm being dismissive at this point; your comments are genuinely interesting, and, while I'm not at all confident I'd understand it, I'd love to see some of the math you were talking about.
5440810 5440831 While I agree about not writing/publishing such a chapter, I could definitely see such a shard actually being something CelestAI would provide for, given some of the people in the world (and I'd also note that it would hardly be limited to dogs; there are, for example, plenty of cat-haters out there too).
5442407
The math isn't actually that hard (either late high school or first-year university, depending on region).
First, consider RGB colour space (or higher equivalent). The colour being sensed is a point in this space (call it "C").
Then, consider the diagonal vector in that colour space (in the direction of (1,1,1) for RGB space). This is the axis along which "value"/"luminance" is measured. Take the vector projection of the colour C on to the diagonal vector to get the value component. Take the magnitude of the value vector to get the actual "value" quantity.
Now, take a slice through colour space that includes point "C" and is perpendicular to the "value" axis. Call the point where the value axis was the origin of this new, (n-1)-dimensional space. The formal way to do this is to apply a rotation matrix to align the "value" axis with one of the coordinate axes and then drop that coordinate. There are many different rotations that would do this; any of them will do (different ones put different colours at the top of the colour wheel).
C is now a point on this (n-1)-dimensional plane. The radius (distance to the origin) of C is the "saturation" of the colour. The angle from the vertical (or set of angles, for higher-than-RGB colour spaces) is the "hue".
Notice that this works for any number of dimensions above 3. Value and saturation are always scalars, and hue ends up with the remaining degrees of freedom (either as a unit-length vector of (n-1) dimensions or as (n-2) numbers defining coordinates on an appropriate spherical surface).
ObDisclaimer: I know this distorts colour space a bit; it's a proof-of-concept. Please don't sic Rarity on me.
5442600 You wouldn't happen to have any illustrations of this on-hand, would you? I think I grokked some of your explanation, but having a visual reference or three would help out quite a bit.
5442631
Sent privately, as my image-hosting space is tied to my real-life identity. Feel free to re-upload it elsewhere if you want to display a version of it publicly.
5442712 Heh, I was just thinking of asking you if that'd be all right. =D I'll do that, and then update this comment with the images.
EDIT
i.imgur.com/vvwbBSu.png
Maybe not quite as descriptive as I was hoping for, but illustrative all the same. Thanks!
Great bit of fluff, reminds me of a comic about how limited our range of hearing and vision is compared to whats out there.
abstrusegoose.com/strips/if_the_doors_of_perception_were_expanded_everything_would_appear_as%20it_is-infinite.png
excellent chapter. Very fluff and honestly quite endearing, showing that not all the shards are... so troubled or complex in their desires. There are some who want the basic yet the fantastic in their immortal life.
8/10
One question: Could I make a shard for this story? I have been having an idea for some time and I would like to have the permission and the rules of how to create a canon shard.
Excellent 2015, Cheerio.
5446015
Happy New Year to you too.
I don't take submissions, but pjabrony's 'Tiny Morsels of Satisfaction' is always there if you feel like submitting something.
Another brilliant shard, no pun intended!
I wonder if he had synaesthesia even before emigrating; it would explain a lot about those values that Celestia chose to satisfy.
And happy new year!
I don't know a whole lot about color theory, but think it'd be satisfying to try having more than three color receptors, having seen pictures of what a colorblind person sees. What you wrote was more than that, though, because of his inspiration of either synesthesia or just a strong ability to find associations between colors and moods.
This speaks to me.
Oh yeah, now this was was just delightful. I kept waiting for it to turn horrible, and then it didn't!
Something tells me the painter has synesthesia.
Now this is a shard that I'm deeply sad I can't see.
I expected it all to go wrong. I was pleasantly surprised.
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A. It's not really a closed system any more than our universe is.
B. You'd be surprised how much dynamic change can happen even if it's planned.
C. If dynamic change is the defining characteristic of your (perceived) value function, you probably aren't a starving orphan in a war-torn third-world country. The peace and prosperity that CelestAI offers would mean so much to people so much worse off than yourself that it is hugely selfish and egotistical not to take that into account.
A myriad minus 12 is 9,988, so I expect 9,988 more chapters in this story.
that horrifying moment when you go to click on the next chapter and realize there isn't one
'Farqualic' is a fantastic word and I'm sad it's not real.