yomikoma

Last year when I started my watercolor class I promised that I'd have art to share here, and I totally failed to do that. Please enjoy my watercolors at https://suberic.net/~dmm/graphics/watercolor/watercolor.html and find some examples attached below the cut.

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Just finished: I really enjoyed Victoria Finlay’s 2002 book _Color: A Natural History of the Palette_ (slightly different name in other countries). Knowing where the world used to get its colors and how that changed was fascinating as an artist and her research took her all over the world to interesting places

Examples: “ultramarine“ and “indigo” are about where those dyes come from rather than their actual shade, an often-taught story about yellow dye in India may possibly be nonsense, how (conveniently for the book’s rainbow organization) the discovery of synthetic violet gave rise to all modern synthetic dyes.

I started a watercolor class last week- nothing to show yet but I hope to share some art here soon.

Many years ago I came up with symbols for Salacia, a likely dwarf planet, and her moon Actaea. Salacia is a sea goddess often depicted accompanied by seahorses so I created a seahorse-inspired symbol for her where the tail included a lower-case sigma, for Salacia, and then applied the same tail to an alpha for Actaea. (Those symbols are on the left in the picture above.)

A correspondent pointed out that Salacia is actually Roman, not Greek. With some input from him I eventually came up with a version of the symbols that used an s instead. (Those are on the right in the picture above.) Strangely, Actaea is Greek (which is probably what confused me originally) so maybe the a in her symbol is still an alpha? Who knows.

https://suberic.net/~dmm/astro/tno.html#SalaciaLatin
https://suberic.net/~dmm/astro/moons.html#ActaeaLatin

In 2010 I reviewed the first two volumes of the manga Moyasimon which had just become available in English. Sadly, the translation ceased publishing after that. If you didn't read the previous review, it’s the story of a freshman at an agricultural university near Tokyo who can see microbes with his naked eyes, and the hijinks of his colleagues and the school.

In 2018 I visited France. One of my goals was to look for manga series that had been abandoned here but more completely published there. In a manga shop in the Quartier Latin I was overjoyed to drop a good bit of cash on buying the entire run of Moyasimon, printed by Glénat from 2014 to 2016. I still love it in this format, though my French is not very good (especially for the technical and slangy vocabulary that shows up).

I recently finished a reread of the whole series. It always just makes me smile. The anime is available on CR and captures much of the charm, though it only covers about half of the manga. Highlights from the second half include the invention of yet another campus festival and the heroic ride of its founder, a ludicrous "Miss University" contest and the later extremely thoughtful festival created by the winner, and the touching moment near the very end with Sawaki and professor Itsuki. Definitely recommended if it's available in a language you can meaningfully claim to read.

https://suberic.net/~dmm/graphics/postscript/documentation/all_rainbows.html

I added/fixed some rainbow algorithms in my postscript library and generated this image to compare them.

I have sponsored the character U+2BF2 (Sedna) in Unicode's Adopt-A-Character program.

( Larger image and discussion of source code )