#social media burn out go brrr

[mint-and-authoress]

as I sit here in my home

surrounded by the stone

water leaking from the soil above

and the smaller creatures finding their places for the night

I recall the goings on of humans

I often miss the human events

what with the distance between they and me

the tales carry along the wind

the scents and sounds of humans

permeating through the air

or perhaps from the crow

they who more expertly understand

how the humans behave

they bicker frequently I'm told

regarding the important and meagre

the territory disputes I may understand

yet they seem neverending

these humans find themselves wholly important

more than any creature they may know

for they have invented freedom

not knowing all may be free

or perhaps they do realise

yet sequester it away

humans are covetous from what I'm told

they have made language

an odd thing that again they must simplify

mutual understanding is lost upon them

instead choosing to howl as the dogs do

and while it is their form of making contact

no one understands a thing

and all meaning has been lost

it is not to say these creatures are mindless

bare of heart or mind

for they have truly done wondrous things

as I have aged the humans have too

but for where I am ageless

they are soon to match

for where they are able to converse

I have learned their ways in turn

for their concept of truest love

I have found my flock

though perhaps these apes have

put paw upon one too many unclaimed leaves

for they have swallowed this realm whole

deeming all those unlike them

forsaken

for where they have invented freedom

so too do they take it away

for where they have made love

so too have they wrought death

and so I remain here

a slime cast to the wayside

attempting to simply remain forever

remain with my loves

attempting to be simple

in a world which refuses

[lokifreign]

you might be a tetrachromat

thoughts been rolling around in my head since the “magenta isn’t real?!?!?” post showed up.

• so: but: like: all the colors are fake - 

or, invented by the brain to represent something in the sensual world. As all words are made up, all names are given names, all experienced memories are new constructs. Color is a thing the brain does with its information! :) it’s good, it’s magic.

• Right now, prevailing scientific theory is a lot more conservative than I am in estimating how many tetrachromats there are. Science seems to hint that it’s passed through the X chromosome.

• (Quick Science Fun Sidebar: turns out non-mutant eyeballs work somewhat differently than we thought) Eyes are in the top five weirdest evolutionary consequences don’t you think? absurd to imagine that we “know” what’s going on with visual processing any more clearly than we grok gravity or the weak force - the eye is still mostly a complete mystery. For this reason I think it’s pertinent to experimentally assume that our lived experiences can add to the volume of scientific data about chromacy in general. Whooo

'Tetrachromat’ means an eye has a mutant cell. The tetrachromatic eye-bearer can (we now know) see (oh just so many) more colors than the average. In my experience it’s possible for these extra colors to kind of “disappear” across puberty, though I taught myself to see them as a kid, because they aren’t represented in language or media. For that reason it’s one of those things you can’t really test for on the internet, but there are ways to find out. Even if you don’t have the cell, the exercises for it are mentally rigorous and probably healthful brain-training.

I’m a tetrachromat; take that how you will! Burn me if you can catch me. It’s not even the weirdest basic-physical thing about me, so, yeah I might need to be burned at the stake one of these days. 

One effect of tetrachromacy is that all screens look a certain way to me (that I gather they don’t to others) - it’s impossible to depict real color on screens, to me; it will never look real or right. The artwork I make (and which of it I’ll put on the web / into digital form if it didn’t start there) is heavily affected by this; it’s gotten more extreme as digital images have gone from a niche thing to worldwide dominance. Way less than ‘half colored’. Remember in the late 60s & 70s how they’d put out comics in which every component was inked a solid color? Peter Parker green, Jonah Jameson red, background YELLOWWWW (brrr) - that’s what most digital art looks like to me when compared to a painting or nondigital photograph - even b&w / silver prints look vastly more colorful to my eyeball than screens. The really expensive screens have this (nifty but distracting) 2.5D thing going on, too, where there are all these neon outlines and everything is floating an inch off the screen.

 I recently discovered a friend of mine is, too, when he said “I love that one blue-amber color the sky has at certain times of day”. I was like “??! ooooh you see it!” and quizzed him about other off-trail colors: “how about the vibrating blue-yellow? you know about the neon grey-orange-blue right? and the green version??” and we talked about the Color Out Of Space for an hour. Then we talked about screens & analog vs digital. Him being a cismale tends to support my theory that the scientists have not yet figured out how this thing expresses itself physically. We can find woman-tetrachromats easier for reasons that are tantalizingly clear to me but nearly impossible to put into words. This language / medium gap fucks other fields up, too, is my guess - redacts our data set.

I hereby hypothesize that gnc/genderfluid and enby people may be more likely to be able to experience and communicate a physically expressed tetrachromacy gene! [thunderclap] due to different experience of society / socialization & relationship to language. 

anyway; google it “tetrachromat” and try some stuff out - let’s increase the official numbers! and take over this planet