adventures in cubing

A couple months ago I stumbled onto a video by Teal Cubes showing his custom color scheme — blue opposite green, gray opposite white, and pink opposite yellow. The video makes a pretty compelling demonstration that there are better schemes than the 1980s Rubik’s one that most of use without much further thought. That said, I don’t really like pink stickers, and I’m not quite ready to make three color changes at once.

I was curious about the gray U face, though — and I re-stickered a black and a white cube to give it a shot.* The idea is that gray contrasts better against white than does yellow. Obviously, black would contrast even better, but it gets lost on a black cube; gray plays nicely with both black and white plastic. Here’s a video with a further explanation:

Yes, this is my first narrated video. For a variety of reasons I won’t get into here, I prefer the partial anonymity of mere characters on a blog and disembodied hands in a video. Also, I think I’m a more competent writer than speaker (with nasally “ums” and what-nots). The “passé” at 0:31 is somewhere between “insane” and some other inaudible garbage. A sort of non-lyrical equivalent to Bowie’s “clown control to Mao Zedong” or Hendrix’ “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” Still, I thought it was time to try something different. I’m interested to see what kind of feedback I get.

I did not find it hard to adapt to gray. Nor did I find a tremendous advantage. Yes, in low-level lighting, it has a better contrast than yellow (which can be mistaken for white or green), but the difference is easy to exaggerate. I think gray looks slick on white (better than yellow does), but makes black cubes feel very dark.

I’m not going to rush to re-sticker these. But nor am I about to switch all my other cubes to gray. Fun experiment at least….