Alicornutopia

Alicorn wrote:Moiety means "one of two parts into which a thing can be divided". So originally one was mine and one was kappa's and they had colors for easy adjectiving.

...It's exploded since then. Pick your favorite really obscure color.

Is now the time to suggest that perhaps picking colors has outlived its usefulness? I don't know about others but I personally have reached the point where I can no longer visually distinguish a lot of the options in a quick scan, which has reduced its presence in things like the daily report to "cute but not actually useful".

I concur with Marri in principle but cannot at the moment think of any equally convenient manner of moiety differentiation.

Well, I suppose a relevant question is, what do people use moiety differentiation for right now? When talking about characters I would probably personally use "Marri pups" or "AndaisQ pups" and not worry about "reds" and "pinks", and I'm curious where else it comes up for people.

I definitely think in terms of "purples", but I suppose that's not surprising.

It's handy to see the colours attached to things - it at least narrows down whose character something might be.

In the ebooks, I really like the ability to see at a glance which comments were made by which author. That doesn’t work as well if two people with similar colors are working in the same sandbox, of course, but for the major storylines (Effulgence, Incandescence, Witchlight, Radon Absinthe, etc.) that hasn’t happened yet. It’s probably easier to keep track of when the color coding is the same across multiple continuities, although I have not read most of the sandboxes in ebook version so I’m not sure how much that holds.

I agree that it would be better to use usernames as adjectives instead of colors, but I want some way of distinguishing comments at a glance while reading a story. Maybe expand from single colors to “red on gold” or something; take advantage of a combinatorial explosion? That seems like it wouldn’t actually work well, but maybe something along those lines would.

I mostly just write and don't worry about this kind of thing. Also is this thread right for a moiety discussion?

It wasn't. Now it is!

DanielH wrote:In the ebooks, I really like the ability to see at a glance which comments were made by which author. That doesn’t work as well if two people with similar colors are working in the same sandbox, of course, but for the major storylines (Effulgence, Incandescence, Witchlight, Radon Absinthe, etc.) that hasn’t happened yet. It’s probably easier to keep track of when the color coding is the same across multiple continuities, although I have not read most of the sandboxes in ebook version so I’m not sure how much that holds.

I agree that it would be better to use usernames as adjectives instead of colors, but I want some way of distinguishing comments at a glance while reading a story. Maybe expand from single colors to “red on gold” or something; take advantage of a combinatorial explosion? That seems like it wouldn’t actually work well, but maybe something along those lines would.

The easiest solution to the collision problem seems to be a slight modification to your suggestion: just have everyone pick a secondary color they can use when collisions arise and then enforce that no two authors can have the same (primary, secondary) pair (and I guess have the two authors with conflicting primary colors work out themselves as it happens who is primary and who is secondary for a given glowfic). That solves it for all two-person glowfic; cases with 3+ have been rare enough so far that I'm not really worried about them.

Of course, I personally don't really care about the colors, and don't anticipate caring about them even if I start glowficcing myself, but this seems like the solution if people do care sufficiently about them.

Displaying the secondary colours on the forum might require someone to solve some sort of technical problem, but I feel like that's at least potentially doable.

I once thought maybe they had outlived their usefulness. But since Adelene started the Daily Report, I find them very useful for skimming the list.

I haven't tried reading with colors in a thread. That's a somewhat different context - fewer salient possibilities at any time, more desire to tell them apart. Were I called upon to comment on this part, I'd have to bring in my opinions on heraldry.