☀️ꙮ➶🌌🖤🦇🐝🌙💻👟🐺🌹🦀☘️📚🖋️🦋🎲🕊️

“Is My Blue Your Blue?” – a site that gives you increasingly-mixed shades of teal, making you sort them as Blue or Green, then tells you where your mental boundary of “green turns into blue at This Point” compares to the population in general.

Mine is “hue 173,” moderately on the green side, i.e. the Exact Midpoint (“turquoise”) counts as a shade of blue to me. Did the test on a family call, where we picked whichever color most people agreed on…and managed to land on True Neutral.

Where’s yours?

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“The color “olo” can’t be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. A laser will be fired into one of your eyes, targeting more than a thousand of your cone cells. (The scientists will have mapped their location on your retina in advance.)”

What I wouldn’t give to get a look at this color. Doesn’t seem likely, though — apparently they’ve already gotten calls from a ton of interested artists, and the retinal mapping process is so involved, even the guy who named the color hasn’t gotten to see it yet.

(…Although the people who have seen it all describe it as some sort of teal. So maybe it’s not as unthinkable as it sounds like it should be.)

Anyone else who got Apple TV for Murderbot reasons, you’ve gotta catch Schmigadoon! before you go. (…It’s the only non-MB thing I’ve watched so far and thought “yes, this is such a treat, I need to tell people about it.”)

The premise is “what if a young professional couple got isekai’d into a musical?” Melissa and Josh are both doctors, their romance is struggling, they go on a couples-retreat hike in the woods…and they walk into a bright colorful town where everyone keeps singing at them.

(The title is a riff on Brigadoon, which is also about normal modern people stumbling into a fantastical small town, but the characters and songs pull from all over. Most of the s1 references I recognized were from The Sound of Music. Gonna indulge in this whole Youtube playlist of Musical Fans breaking down the references.)

At first, our heroes assume it’s some kind of immersive performance! Then they can’t get out of the town. And there’s a leprechaun. And the only way to leave is to achieve True Love, while helping the townsfolk with their own problems along the way. Through song, of course.

The cast is star-studded. (They got Kristen Chenowith! and Jane Krakowski! and Alan Cumming!) The music is amazing — it’s all based on songs from classic musicals, not in a straightforward “we took the original song and gave it new parody lyrics” way, but still in a “hang on, this is a riff on Do Re Mi, isn’t it” way. The writing has a lot of fun with the tropes and the cheesiness of the source material, but the kind where you can tell they have a lot of genuine love and affection for it.

It’s barely a spoiler to say that, yeah, our heroes find True Love by the end of season 1. But after leaving Schmigadoon, they start missing it, and go back to the woods to see if they can find it again…and season 2 has them stumbling into the darker, grittier spectacle of Schmicago.

Now here I got a lot more of the references. (Chicago, obviously — then there’s some Sweeney Todd, some Godspell, some Annie, just a touch of Jesus Christ Superstar, and a delightful sprinkle of Rocky Horror.)

The show got canceled after S2. At least the writers were thoughtful enough to leave us on a hopeful/closure ending instead of a cliffhanger! But it’s a little bit tragic that we’ll never get to see Josh and Mel fumble their way through their custom mashup of Little Shop of Horrors, RENT, Wicked, Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon, and Fun Home.

Did you like the “normal cynical people dealing with a fantastical world of colorful joy” aspect of The Good Place? Were you into the “affectionate parody where we put our whole hearts into writing original music” vibe of Galavant? (Another musical-comedy that was canceled much too soon.) Are you a fan of any/all of the musicals I’ve name-checked so far? Then you should go check out Schmigadoon.

(There’s a nonzero chance that, after I get through all the reference-explaining videos, I’ll go back and watch the whole thing again.)