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Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

This is my party trick. Describe a colour and I'll give you the hex code.

As you can imagine I'm really popular at parties...

There is a boardgame with this theme. First clue is just one word. Second clue is two words. Everyone places a pawn on their color guess. Points awarded based on distance. Easy to play.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/302520/hues-and-cues

This is a good game if you want to be able to hold a conversation with thr people you are playing with. It gets people talking about their experiences. I've played with my own wife and learned about how much she watched TV as a child (did you know Barney changed costumes?), what she thinks of nacho cheese, lipstick, and more.

It is good for people you know as well as people you don't know. The only situation I don't recommend it is if someone in your group wants to win something because the "win" factor is weak.

Oh my god the Barney thing has come up with every single group I've ever played that game with. Blew my mind the first time, then proceeded to blow everyone's minds every game after :D

(y'know, as much as one's mind can be blown by trivia about a children's tv show)

Yes! This game is a lot of fun. My only gripe with it is that the red area is small and the green area is huge, and that's really minor complaint. With the right people this game is amazing.

Now do it by answering with words interpreted as colors using the Netscape algorithm.

I once read a blog post here about how Netscape interpreted colors that are words but aren’t in the official name list, and it comes down to tossing out the non-hex characters and padding/chunking the remaining characters to make RGB numbers, so “dumptruck” might end up being yellow because it ends up being DC0. I immediately wrote a little app that interpreted all the words in /usr/share/dict/words and stuck them in a sqlite db with Lab color representations so you could query for the nearest phony color word for a specific RGB you wanted. It just showed the 100 best matches sorted by closeness, written in their actual color. Fun little spur of the moment evening project.

A picture taken with a Soviet camera, late 1980's, nostalgia and teddy bears, carpets on the wall, dark wood juxtaposed with the lightness of youth.

That'd be a distinct #66666 ... very boring middle grey. But not too bright.

This would of course just be the median colour. It'd be black and white film because it was cheaper, completely incorrectly exposed so that the blacks were bang at the bottom and the film would be much too high an ISO so it'd be grainy as hell. And there would be someone with a really bad hair cut smoking in it.

Source: still own my Zenit from back then :)

Oooh, maybe you know:

What camera / film might have been used for those sepia pictures I keep finding in my family’s old stuff?

Btw: That description with the black blacks was bang-on. Also the smoking, and the haircuts.

The sepia pictures are probably that colour because of the toner that was used at the time when they were printed. The silver halides used in photographic paper weren't very stable and were still quite light sensitive. Sepia toner, as well as giving an artistic view, were used to convert the unstable halides to silver sulfide which lasted a hell of a lot longer (as you found out :)

So not film or camera specific really.

A melancholy purple reminiscent of the twilight depicted in childrens books, 1910, colorized.

#8855aa

eeeeff

, exhaled Clara, 'Do you really want to go that stupid dance?'

"FACADE" came the reply

OK let's go!

A muddy yellow reminiscent of the sweet and sour fruit found across Central America and the Southern States.

(Taken from a paint description)

ffcc33

I'm going on supermarket starfruit here so might be a bit off :)

Maybe something darker like e5b934? I think we are better off giving ranges though. :P

It's Hog Plum, if you google it. #FBCP001.

I'm disgusted and enraged. Really liked the answers better.

Yeah the answers seem like nicer colors, pretty close but too little green? #ffcc33 is beautiful btw

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