#people who can do color theory well and dont spend years trying to figure it out; PLEASE tell me your secrets

[3000-200-grains-of-salt]

blehhh my eyes are so strained, ive been doing quantum physics in my brain trying to figure out colors for the past >30 minutes. what in the hell is a color theory. why green. how does. h.

what kept happenign was i would figure out all the colors. they looked great and all. but then i remember that i have to color the figures. they have to have their own slew of stupid other colors that dont match and theres a billion of them and theyre all different. aaa.

[twocubes]

heres my thoughts about 17776; its an unedited chatlog because thats thematically appropriate and also the day is almost over and im sleepy. also i should mention at the start that 17776 is aesthetically pleasing and “good” as a piece of media (in my judgement but also like who cares about that tbh)

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:39] also 17776 makes me feel bad and its complicated for me to articulate why

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:40] like i get that it's trying to make me feel bad, and it's articulating why it thinks it's doing it quite clearly

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:40] but theres a different reason

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:40] and i gotta think about it

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 17:40] oh interesting

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:42] i think it's like

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:42] so to me, the most important point of mathematics is that it allows you to imagine new things

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:50] so for allegory: some time ago, someone published this paper, "Possible bubbles of spacetime curvature in the south pacific" (you can find it here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.8144.pdf ). it's kind of a joke paper with real math in it?

anyways the point of it is that, the author takes this one lovecraft story and pretends that the fake work inside it (the diary of some sailor that ends up on an island where lovecrafty stuff happens) is real and proceeds to show that, with judicious applications of general relativity, you can interpret the sailor's story as indicating that some specific kind of exotic matter is on this island, that a whole bunch of the eldritch stuff that disturbed him (the sailor) can be explained as gravitational spacetime distortion, and how the whole thing can be figured out to be something something etc.

But like, from an outside perspective, the "geometry that doesn't make sense" details from inside the place were originally invented specifically so they would appear to be complete nonsense; to be completely uninterpretable and this is supposed to be what drives the person mad; mathematics, in its own development, ended up providing us a way to reach beyond what were once the limits of our understanding and comprehend the incomprehensible

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:51] it's like

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:52] ok, so you know how people say that mathematics is boring? I'm fairly certain that they mean that in the same way that they mean it when they say that business or politics is boring

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:54] which is that it's opaque. people say things, you don't understand them, they slide off of you, so the whole thing ends up being boring because everything you don't understand is like a color you can't see; it's... gray

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 17:54] totally

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 17:56] mathematics is (to me) the ultimate expression of trying to reach out and see the colors you can't see. to go beyond yourself and appreciate things that you cannot appreciate now because they are impossible to appreciate without the theory there to let you understand them

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:01] what frustrates me about 17776 is that i know exactly how i would spend 15000 years. like, this is not hyperbole. i have already had plans for my life ive had to reject because they would take over a century and given 150 of them i would do all of them and then more.

and i see what this person estimates people would do and i am reminded of that feeling that haunted me as a kid that no one is actually trying to understand anything outside their own perspective to the extent that interests me and i feel bad about it

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:01] that's a really nice way of thinking about mathematics

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:11] mathematicians often diss other branches of mathematics as "boring"

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:12] like they say that about analysis a lot or

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:12] logic, fairly frequently

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:15] and like, i remember, when i was at the end of high school/beginning of college deciding that this was bullshit; that some people liked those branches and it was incumbent on me to understand why. and i tried, and it was hard, and i ended up better for it. not so bored by everything. and, yknow, more powerful.

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:16] more well-rounded

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:16] yeah

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:16] but also, yknow

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:17] better able to defeat boredom, which is the true enemy of learning to appreciate things (aka studying)

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:30] i never thought of boredom like that

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:32] grey is always used as a signifier of things being boring; but all grey means is that you don't see the colors. so on and so forth

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:32] one defeats boredom not by finding something to do, one defeats boredom by finding how things are interesting

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:33] etc etc etc

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:33] idk ive had a lot of thoughts

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:33] :3

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:33] i like ur thoughts

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:33] ur thought are making me think of other thoughts

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:33] *thoughts

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:34] mmm

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:34] i guess i dont do that so much these days because like

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:34] i know i have enough things im interesting to last like

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:35] a thousand years

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:35] if i learned more things to be interested in i would become even more anxious

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:36] 17776 seems to come from a perspective that never went through that phase and never went though a period of having to stop doing that for your own sake

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:36] death is terrifying when you realize youve learned enough that you could do research for 1000 years

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:37] so you close yourself a little so you don't get too depressed. but if i did have infinite time, i could have kept on going

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:37] and that would have been great

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:37] but i can't

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:37] anyways

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:37] that's why 17776 makes me feel bad

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:39] because it's ignoring this mechanism that i was forced to stop using by the finiteness of my life

Nicky Flowers, [12.07.17 18:39] awww :/

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:41] it's treating what was to me a trauma as natural, is maybe a way to put it

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:42] "everyone is cut down in this way, that's just how things are" no. i did this. finiteness did this. i remember what it was like without this and i had to stop.

Val Twocubes, [12.07.17 18:43] im... gonna stop talking about this ive gone on too long