jlh | color war! it is actually nearly here!

COLOR WAR WILL START ON MONDAY!

If you haven't been following me for long, I started Color War two years ago as a fun ridiculous bracket-based poll where the stakes are incredibly low, there are no real world or fandom implications, but since we all have favorite colors everyone still cares! It's literally voting on which color you like best. The first year we did the original colors in a Crayola 64-pack in 1958; the second we did 64 of the 69 colors that have been added to Crayola since then.

This year, we're doing things a little differently, thanks to the suggestions of my pals

ikyoto and

vermilionsun. There will also be a few logistical changes.

Colors are real! That is, the colors you will see will not be the html approximations, but actual photographs, taken and color-corrected by the awesome

vermilionsun, of sheets of paper that

ali_wildgoose,

pts and I hand-colored with actual crayons. You can even see that distinctive crayon texture in the photos.

vermilionsun did an amazing job, and I can't thank her enough for the idea and the effort.

Colors do not have names! It's been really fun watching people vote partly on color and partly on name (manatee!) for the past two rounds, especially since the names are part of how we interact with Crayola crayons in particular. This year, per

ikyoto's suggestion, we're ditching the names and only identifying the colors via numbers. They're slightly randomized, though I didn't stress about it too much, and if you really wanted to go through all the swatches and figure out which color is which you probably could, though there's no pattern to it . Feel free to speculate in the comments however!

The poll will take place on Dreamwidth! Three reasons:

Only LJ users can vote in LJ polls, and I have some RL friends on tumblr that I would love to include. On DW, anyone with an open ID can vote—if you have an LJ, google, orange, yahoo, flickr, wordpress, blogger, myspace, or aol account, you already have an open ID and can log into DW using that, and vote in the poll! (I'm anonymizing the results, so even I won't know who votes for what, and won't see your id unless you decide to comment.)
DW is a little more stable lately than LJ. To be fair, LJ has been hit with a lot of DDoS attacks that are politically motivated surrounding the elections in Russia, and they're a bigger target generally. I support their keeping up the good fight for free political speech in Russia, but I also want people to be able to vote reliably in the damn poll.
DW is great! I'd love to have more of you who don't have DW accounts or who do but don't really use them over here on DW, I must admit. Though the first is really the biggest reason I'm moving the poll, and the second a serious consideration, this would be a nice bonus!

Anyway enough of THAT.

Voting will start on MONDAY with the first quarter of the bracket. I'll put up another quarter bracket each morning next week, and you'll have at least 48 hours to vote in each poll (though if the results are very close, I reserve the right to leave it open a little longer as I did last year). We'll start the second round the following MONDAY.

I'll be putting links to the DW voting on my LJ, twitter and tumblr. Feel free to spread the word further, and I hope this can bring everyone some fun as we go into the summer!