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by RealDinosaur 2702 days ago
The other fascinating thing is light-fastness. PR83 (Alizarin Crimson) is a cool red (purple facing), and is recommended by many art teachers...

It's also objectively shit as a pigment. It is not light-fast at all, and fades after only a few months.

https://www.justpaint.org/alizarin-crimson-now-you-see-it/

Yet art teachers continue to recommend it. Nowadays most companies sell it as a 'Hue'. That is a mixture of more light-fast paints designed to emulate the original, but some companies sell 'Alizarin Crimson Genuine', which is still recommended by academics to this day.

Other fugitive colors include aureolin and chrome yellow. The later of which was used by Van Gogh and has caused his paintings to fade irreversibly.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-I...

2 comments

Alizarin Crimson is so predictably shit for lightfastness that it's (apparently) actually used to calibrate lightfastness checking.
Thanks, I’m going to read myself into a coma tonight.
> ... read myself into a coma

is this a common phrase or regular expression? American or British english?

I do this all the time, and when I start to feel like I'm going to crash, I force myself until I'm close to the next deep insight (like when you see a set of equations slowly taking a certain shape and you think "ok, I think I see where this is going") and stop reading there and then, go to sleep, and the next morning ... the very first thing I think about is finishing that train of thought... It somehow helps me remember the information better, I don't know why but uf I had to take a guess: when we expose ourself to information we aren't wondering about, our brain does not perceive it as important, while if you set up the experience as a cliffhanger, you trick your brain into pondering the unfinished train of thought, both as you try to fall asleep and the moment you wake up and realize you want to finish the train of thought... it's like you get to pick one low effort memorizable deep insight per day (you could reach more during the day, but those require higher level of effort, and don't reside in the uncertain or pondering phase long enough to subconsciously gain importance, we remember our big breakthroughs not our smaller ones, and when you know you will read the answer in a few seconds your brain exerts less effort in pondering the questionn)

I don't know about common, but it just follows the pattern of "drink oneself into a stupor".