TOS Novel Chronology???
- Thread starter Kagan
- Start date
Now that I know there really is red in there, I can see it.
Reminds me of that scene in "Pawns and Symbols" by Majliss Larson, where Klingons on the Enterprise get into hot water with Security for entering a room that had black writing on a red door.
That's rather fascinating. I wish I knew what it was you're perceiving.
So do I.
Essentially, until the OP mentioned that the updated text was red (and note that I can now see it as a vivid red!), my brain happily interpreted all the red and black text as black. I seem to be able to "learn" to differentiate between colours on a single example once I "know" to look for difference. But you could easily convince me I was wrong, even if I was right.
I'm red/green colour blind, but the two colours that drive me absolutely crazy are lime and orange. I know that they are contrasting colours - and appear on totally opposite sides of the standard artists' colour wheel, as do such extremes as yellow/violet - but I would probably never notice lime lettering on an orange wall, or orange lettering on a lime wall. I lost my job as a golf caddy when orange golf balls became popular in the 70s. (So did my brother, who always swore he wasn't colour blind.)
My TV has an orange light that goes red or green when turning on or off, but until recently I assumed it always stayed orange, as some kind of "stand by" indicator.
As a kid, I saw brilliant green grass, on a b/w TV set, in b/w episodes of "The Flintstones". I simiply never knew better and always wondered why TVs were referred to a "black and white" when the images were black, white, grey and green. In Kindergarten, I used to get (secretly) highly stressed trying to differentiate brown and black, and violet and blue. I didn't know I had the red/green problem till I was about 11.
I once did a blog entry on my dilemmas with colour - and would welcome hearing of others' experiences, 'cos I'm working on a book idea.
http://therinofandor.blogspot.com/2008/07/confessions-of-colourblind-man-now-i.html
You must really miss out on ambience during red alerts
You mean when they flash that green light on the bridge?
Would someone like to take up the mantel and move the site to another place and keep it updated? That would be quite a nice thing for someone to do.
The site owner is around here every so often. Carolyn Winifred was a "Strange New Worlds" finalist (#10) and 3rd prize winner. Although she got very angry emails from one of the Timeliners who objected strongly to it becoming an online version.
By the way, Christopher:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Flag_color_blind.png
All of these flags, except the lower middle one (which looks green where the blue should be, but I assume is grey), are identical to my eye.
Fascinating. That suggests it's a matter of perception, the brain's interpretation of the input. A B&W TV transmits no green light to your eyes, just grey; so I'd guess that you see green and grey as the same color, which would "objectively" be grey if that term has any meaning here, but you've grown up learning to identify that color with the concept of "green." It raises a perennial question that's tough to answer: do people see the same colors as one another? Is what I see when I look at something red the same thing that another, non-colorblind person would see when they look at something red? How much of our perception is objective and how much is our own individual brains' idiosyncratic ways of attaching values to our sensory inputs?
I'm reminded of what happens when I wear my blue-block sunglasses, which tint everything amber. I used to have a yellow beanbag chair, and I discovered that when I looked at it through the sunglasses, I perceived it as white. Now, when I looked at it halfway through the sunglasses and halfway not, I could see that I was seeing the exact same shade of yellow in both cases. But through the sunglasses, white things also looked yellow, and so my brain compensated by shifting its perceptions of the color values to match. The brain does this all the time; color perception is highly context-dependent, adjusting to fit the ambient light, which is why colors seem basically the same to us in both sunlight and incandescent light even though the latter is far redder (the temperature of a light-bulb filament is comparable to that of a cool M-type star, a red dwarf). So even though my eye was still seeing the yellow light from the beanbag chair, my brain was perceiving it as pure white.
With the timeline site, I'd assume your eye is perceiving the red light from the text, but your brain doesn't notice the difference between the red and the black until it's pointed out that there is a difference. But there's no telling if what you're perceiving as "vivid red" is the same thing I perceive when I look at it. Maybe it's something you've learned by association to comprehend as red. Then again, the same could be said of what I see as red. We could all see something totally different in each of our heads, but we've all been raised to associate what we see with the term and concept "red."
Let's take a look at this...
The base has a slight sepia tone to it, but definitely still in the gray family.
As for the flags,
I. Royal blue field, bright red and white stripes
II. Slightly darker blue field, red stripes are now dark gray (maybe a greenish tint, but that could be the monitor putting in its two cents' worth)
III. Normal colors, just slightly subdued
IV. Stripes look normal, field looks black
V. Everything's varying shades of gray
Sigh. So not even the green one is green?
Upon further review, the stripes on II are definitely tinted green.
The best way to do it is put it up the site someplace else and not give an email address so this nasty person cannot contact the new site owner.
^How is it "nasty" for a creator of copyrighted material to protest when someone reprints it without permission?
What's nasty about writers protesting the online publication of a list that they had worked on for the print medium? At the time a few of the Timeliners were concerned that having their work updated online (esp. by others) would reduce the chances of the timeline ever being put into print again, and they were probably right. And that if anyone updated it, it should be them. (As they were/are doing, in case Pocket desires to publish an updated version.)
As for email addresses, I don't tend to trust web sites that have no facility for contacting the list owner. How does one notify of typos, omissions and errors if there's no way to contact the list owner?
FWIW, I love the VoI timeline (and book!), but I tend to use the online one more, simply because it's searchable. I like to look up when a book occurs before I read it (yeah, I know many TOS and TNG novels are continuity-free and even contradictory, but I ruthlessly cram them together nonetheless) and it's much quicker typing the name into a search box than flipping though a dozen pages.
I hope someone with too much free time decides to add in every single Trek comic one day. I'd love to see how the more eccentric comics are dated!
I hope someone with too much free time decides to add in every single Trek comic one day. I'd love to see how the more eccentric comics are dated!
I couldn't begin to imagine how you'd get the Gold Key stuff in there, but the Marvel and DC material fits in rather nicely, and the Okuda dates for ST II-V are very conveniently spaced out in such a way as to allow enough time for the comics to occur...I hope someone with too much free time decides to add in every single Trek comic one day. I'd love to see how the more eccentric comics are dated!
I'm not certain if the other authors involved share my assumptions exactly, but my chronology has Unworthy covering from early June to early July 2381, Over a Torrent Sea (aside from the prologue) spanning early July to early August, and Synthesis in the last week of August.
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