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Why hello again, and so soon!

Earlier this month I had this thought about string lights, and so I made this video about it.

An earlier version was more classic ranty, but, I didn't like it so I re-did it as a more gentle, repressed rage. Hopefully the end result has a classic vihart feel without being emotionally out of date for 2023.

The end!

🕷,

Vi

Files

I have opinions about string light colors

It's fine though. Bonus exercises for those who absolutely will continue to overthink this for the rest of their lives: 1. If you have a 150 light strand with 5 “Christmas” colors, and decide to remove all the pink ones and make it a 4 color pattern, what’s the minimum number of lights you’ll have to replace/move? Can you generalize to any number of lights and colors? 2. Choose, or create, a holiday that doesn’t have string lights as part of its standard decor… yet. Decide what colors the lights should be, considering how the colors will mix and light the room. Get as detailed about frequency, spectrum, and incandescent vs led considerations as you want. 3. Remember how you could think of chasing light patterns as moving slowly in one direction, faster in the other, or even faster in the original direction? How far does this go? Can you come up with a way to describe this, for different numbers of lights and different chase patterns? 4. Create something that has the vibe of string lights with different colors and chase patterns. Use a musical instrument, a computer program, makeup, dance, or any medium you enjoy. It could use simple blobs of color, plain text numbers, sounds, or movements. 5. Say you have 3 spider light factories, each of which exclusively makes one color of light: orange, purple, and green. If you are producing 3 different colors for 10 bulb string lights that start and end with orange, how much efficiency are you losing by having idle factories that don’t need to produce as many purple and green spiders? 6. Prove irrefutably that spiders are a christmas animal. This Video was supported by viewers like you, on Patreon. Special thanks to Ray Sidney, Andew Romaner, David Perryman, Alan Boulton, Carol Hart, David A Smith, and Yana Chernobilsky.

Comments

John McKay

Yes, back in the deep dark past of my childhood Christmases, when we used the big bulbs with reflectors because they got so hot, they were red, green, blue, and gold. Flashing and chasing were for movie marquees. Kudos on the mellow vibe, plus ça change….

David Peaker

A few years ago I made some Christmas decorations using nixie tubes which were backlit with neopixel LEDs. The characters on the nixies changed at random as did the led colours. The LEDs can have 256 values for hue, luminosity and saturation, giving 16 million possible colours. By keeping luminosity and saturation constant so the LEDs all had the same brightness, I limited the number of different colours to 256. I'm really not a bad person, honestly!

Perryman

Yay! I've got my hands on some RGBW strips that can pass data fast enough to act as displays, and am thinking about what materials I can diffuse the light through. Maybe a DIY wall light panel.

Matt Cengia

"oh no I can't find the thing that's out of stock"... this went down-hill fast and I *totally* felt this anxiety, and I *love* that this video was able to evoke that! 🟣🔵🟡🔴🟢 (Also yet again I lament there's no "pink" emoji circle/square/heart/etc)

Kevin V

This is funny to me because I'm 34 and even I had the pink lights when I was a kid. They mean Christmas to me! Maybe it's a regional thing?

Imre Polik

Have you ever considered a collaboration with Technology Connections on the topic? He is very opinionated about string lights.

Adam Silcott

The frustration of living in a world where bean counters make everything base ten whether it should be or not.

Charles T Hart

Back in the 70s & 80s, Grandpa Jim had 6-colored light strands. There was blue, green, pink, orangy-yellow, red & white. The strands were in multiples of 20 with the light bulbs randomly ordered, except the white. Each group of 20 only had 1x white bulb because it made that group flash. More than once, George re-arranged the light bulbs. -CTH

vihart

I hadn't heard of him before I posted this video, but a lot of people have mentioned him! Seems like he has the right and objectively correct idea about things.