#vexilology

[littlepillbugs]

I made a simple flag maker! No download needed, it's all on my site and made with JavaScript & HTML.

[debian-official]

do you have a favourite flag, real or fictional?

you mean besides --no-preserve-root?

I don't think I know any great fictional flags. I do really like Amsterdam's. I don't really like Amsterdam itself though

[lab-practicum]

lesbian yugoslavia flag

[bashar-gibara]

A Brief Analysis on the flags of Medieval Two Total War #1

Introduction and Aztecs | Part 02

Aztecs 

 

In-Game Symbol 

This one had me a bit confused, as I couldn’t figure out 100% what it’s depicted due to the low resolution of the game. Though I think it’s the Sun/Calendar Stone. As the name suggests, it’s a monolithic calendar constructed during the reign of Moctezuma II (1500s-1520). It was found in 1790, under the Zócalo square of Mexico City, at the ruins of the Main Temple of Tenōchtitlan, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli the war god and Tlaloc the rain god. At the centre a deity is depicted, thought to be Tōnatiuh the Sun Deity of daytime Sky.  On the aligning circles are carved various symbols representing the eras, centuries and days of the Aztec calendar as well as the four points on the horizon, Moctezuma’s name and two fire serpents. It is debated whether it was used solely as a calendar or as a sacrificial altar.  

(Images from Wikipedia)

📜 Historicity  📜

This flag is fictional but inspired by historical elements. The yellow colour for one of the Sun deities is fitting as well as the turquoise colour, which is matching with Tōnatiuh’s epithet of “Turquoise Lord”. Tōnatiuh was one of the most prominent deities of the Aztecs –as well as of other Mesoamerican cultures. The use of the entirety of the sunstone was what confused me the most. As far as I know, the American people and their rulers didn’t use flags, but of course one had to be made for the game. According to Wikipedia, the Aztecs used banners with intricate designs, called Pāmitl in Nahuatl to represent officers and important warriors on the battlefield. Those banners are indeed present in-game and appear on the backs of certain units. 

(Pāmitl as depicted on the Codex Mendoza-1540s)

(Pāmitl used by in-game units)

☝️🤓 My humble suggestion  ☝️🤓

Although, I think I can understand the reasoning behind it, I believe that this flag can be improved. We can keep the Sun elements with the original colours, but the Sun Stone could be replaced with a depiction of Tōnatiuh, or perhaps another sun deity like Huitzilopochtli. Or since gods’ depictions are very detail and something simpler would be more practical, we can put an animal ascosiated with the sun. Like an eagle, as these birds are associated with Huitzilopochtli. In Aztec mythology eagles were present when the sun was created, as well in Tenōchtitlan’s founding myth, the Aztecs decided to build their city on the place where an eagle landed and ate a snake. The eagle was believed to have been Huitzilopochtli. Let’s not forget that this scene is depicted in Mexico’s coat of arms. An alternative could be the hummingbird, another bird linked with Huitzilopochtli that has some supernatural properties of its own. It was believed that hummingbirds were the reincarnation of fallen warriors. One last suggestion would be the jaguar, an animal associated with the creator god Tēzcatlīpohca and represented military might.  

(Tōnatiuh as depicted in Codex Borgia- 16th c.)

(Huitzilopochtli as depicted in Codex Telleriano-Remensis-After 1542)

(Codex Mendoza)

(Aztec Spirit Bird from Mexico City, Jorge Enciso-1947)

(Hummingbird, Codex Mendoza)

(Jaguar depicted in Codex Magliabechiano-16th c.)

Sources

[giggymantis]

On one hand all the progress flags do a great job of representing their included groups.

On the other hand, WOW they are UGLY. I wish there were a better way to include all of these colors without actually including new colors

[lab-practicum]

Y ddraig!

just so you know

[divine-ray]

you know what’d go hard as flag combo?

the BDSM triskelion and Otherkin/Therian star/delta-theta.

[vanillaswirl6]

Doing all 50 states like this (eventually) since I finished designing them all. I hope you like my designs! Starting from W so it's in order.

[bobcat-pie]

i let the rejected eu barcode rest and this is what happened

[scifimagpie]

If this isn't the most amazing analysis of identity flags you've ever read, I want to see what you've read. Incredible queer scholarship has been done here. <3

What Pride Flags Mean, Part 1: Gender and Attraction

Welcome to the latest installment of my autistic hyperfixation on flags! I wanted to figure out a common language of Colour X means Thing Y. Like how pink is consistently used for feminine.

Having a common language for flag meanings matters because it improves cognitive accessibility of flags. ♿️💙

But I didn't want to be prescriptive about what colours should mean what. Just because I think Thing X should go with Colour Y doesn't mean everybody else would.

So this turned into a descriptive, empirical project. I gathered a data set of 2060 pride flag colour choices to figure out what are the most common colour-meaning combinations. Some of the results:

And here are the abstract modifiers: these are modifiers that were generally shared between the genders and the attractions. For example, black is used to indicate having no gender as well as having no attraction.

Click here for tables with okLCH values, hex values, definitions, and notes - I've put a more detailed write-up on my Wikimedia Commons userpage. (Mediawiki supports sortable tables and Tumblr does not.)

METHODS-AT-A-GLANCE

To make the figures above, I assembled a data set of pride flag colours. It contains 2060 colour choices from 624 pride flags, representing 1587 unique colours. Click here for a detailed description of how I gathered and tagged the pride flag colours and tagged them.

For each tag, I converted every colour to okLCH colour space and computed a median colour. OkLCH colour space is an alternative to RGB/hex and HSL/HSV. Unlike RGB/hex and HSL/HSV, okLCH is a perceptual colour space, meaning that it is actually based on human colour perception. 🌈

In okLCH space, a colour has three values:

- Lightness (0-100%): how light the colour is. 100% is pure white.

- Chroma (0-0.37+): how vibrant the colour is. 0 is monochromatic. 0.37 is currently the most vibrant things can get with current computer monitor technologies. But as computer monitor technologies improve to allow for even more vibrant colours, higher chroma values will be unlocked.

- Hue (0-360°): where on the colour wheel the colour goes - 0° is pink and 180° is teal, and colours are actually 180° opposite from their perceptual complements.

The important thing to know is that okLCH Hue is not the same Hue from HSV/HSL - the values are different! (HSL and HSV are a hot mess and do not align with human colour perception!)

You can learn more about okLCH through my little write up, which was heavily influenced by these helpful articles by Geoff Graham, Lea Verou, and Keith J Grant.

You can play with an okLCH colour picker and converter at oklch.com

🌈

MORE RESULTS: COLOUR DISTRIBUTIONS

Back when I started tagging my data, I divided my data into five main chunks: Gender qualities (e.g. masculine, androgynous), Attraction (e.g. platonic, sexual), Values (e.g. community, joy), Disability (e.g. Deaf, blind), and Other.

I'll talk about Disability and Values in future posts! But for an alternate view of the data, here are the full distributions of the colours that were placed in each tag.

They come in three parts: tags I created for Gender, tags for Attraction, and tags from Other. The abstract modifiers are spread between the first two, though their contents transcend Gender and Attraction.

Some distributions have a lot more variance within them than others. Generally speaking, major attraction types tended to have the least variance: sensual attraction is really consistently orange, platonic is really consistently yellow, etc.

Variance and size do not correlate. Many of the smaller tags are quite internally consistent. I don't have a ton of tags in "current gender" but they're all the same dark purple. Xenine/xenogender has a whole bunch of entries, and there's a really big spread from blue to yellow.

Some tags, like intersex as well as kink/fetish show there are a small number of different colours that are very consistently used. Whereas other tags like masculine show a very smooth range - in this case from cyan to purple.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with how things wound up! 🥳 It makes sense to me that an umbrella term like xenogender would have a lot of variance. What honestly makes me happiest is just how many tags wound up 180 or 90 degrees from their opposites/complements. 🤩

Not everything lined up nicely (the opposite of drag is .... neuroqueer? awkward.) 🤨 Some things lined up in hilarious ways, like how initially I had the opposite of kink/fetish being Christian (amazing.)

But as a whole, there's a lot of structure and logic to where things landed! I hope this makes sense for other people and can help inform both flag making as well as flag interpreting (e.g. writing alt-text for existing flags). 🌈

I'm hoping to post the Disability and Values analyses in the coming days! If you want to learn more, my detailed notes along with tables etc are over on my Wikimedia Commons userspace. 💜

Everything here is Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0, which means you're free to reuse and build on my visualizations, tables, etc. Enjoy!

[lab-practicum]

the nypd flag is such a good design why do only the pigs get to use it

[vidlak-z-vesnice]

Nejsem kdovíjakej vexilolog, ale něco mi tu nehraje

[lgbtplusme]

Terminology all the way down (LGBTQ+)

A lot has changed in my life since my last post. Due to said changes, from now on, this blog will still be about LGBTQ+ terminology, but also: me making flags for identities that don't have one, talking about flags (I have a love for vexilology), and more life-general things like mental health and things of that sort.

In the last post we discussed the terms and history of the LGBTQ+ acronym. From here, we will explore other terms commonly used in other/longer forms of the acronym.

The first term in our journey is intersex. Intersex is not a term referring to gender, instead referring to sex (gender is sociocultural and nueropsychological, sex is biological). Someone who is intersex is someone who was born with sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that do not fit the most common anatomical examples of males and females. Intersex is a replacement of the outdated term "hermaphrodite" — though this term is still used in biology, when referring to animals, plants, and other non-human organisms (as a science teacher with queer and nonbinary students, this is an important note to make).

Nonbinary or non-binary (either is correct), sometimes shortened to "enby," is a gender term that refers to any gender identity that is not strictly male or female all the time, and therefore does not fit within the gender binary. This could realize as a "third gender" or a person that only partially identifies as a man or woman (demigender) or a person who exists as different genders at gender times (genderflux, genderfluid). The term "nonbinary" dates back to the 1990s, after the term "genderqueer" gained popularity in queer communities in the 1980s. While anyone identifying as nonbinary, or any gender other that which was assigned at their birth, is by definition transgender, many nonbinary folks do not identify as trans. I personally identify as trans, nonbinary, and other terms we will discuss in the future.

A semi-common acronym for nonbinary/non-binary (either is correct), is "NB." However, this acronym was already in use by the black American community, meaning "Non-Black." Because of this, NB is used less, and, if included in a larger acronym, is often denoted as a simple "N."

Footnote: There is a question whether people who identify with their gender assigned at birth as well as another gender could be trans, and is not a question I feel qualified to answer. My partner identifies as a woman (faer gender assigned at birth) and another gender, and does not identify as trans. As such, the ideas above may not be true for everyone — and that is true for most attempts at categorization of gender and sexuality.

[necarion]

One historical point here: the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, and the Dutch/French Tricolor went hella hard when they first came out. Yeah, they're more tame by comparison, but when your country was like this before the revolution

Which is basically fine, but sort of hard to see and draw, and then you replace it with this:

something you can recognize and identify with like 5 miles out, you've made a bold statement. Further, you're identifying with two of the only other national Republics in history, the Dutch Republic

which is also iconic but wow the color balance is underwhelming, and the United States

(we didn't use a Tricolor because it didn't have the string identification with republics it does now, and anyway we had our own symbolism).

Yeah, the 50 star flag doesn't go quite as hard as the 13 star one, but it is a great piece of national symbolism I'm not sure any other country has? A combination of "this is where we started" and "this is where we are" that keeps updating.

Yeah, I'm patriotic about certain of my national symbols.

the current north macedonian flag goes uncommonly hard imo. would love to see your tier list of country flags

did not realize before today my opinions on flags were this strong or controversial

[scorpio-system]

"r/vexilology; the flag of japan but it's actually this hand towel with a perfectly placed water stain"

"oh shit i just peed on my towel accidentally better turn this into clout"

"it was a WATER STAIN i had an ICE PACK and it LEAKED onto the towel I DIDN'T FUCKING PEE ON IT!"

"You peed on it. You peed on it, didn't you lil piss boy?"

based on this video

[liannaedgelord]

you know, I hate the version of the rainbow flag with the pointy bit, but this one RULES

the colors pair so nicely! and I love the meaning it adds!

(whereas the rainbow flag already represents trans people and has a perfectly good version with the black and brown as part of the stripes instead of being a weird intrusion on the existing design)

I haven't seen this version anywhere so I made one!