Danbooru

Tag alias: space_print -> starry_sky_print

Posted under Tags

Yeah, not all space prints are just starry skies. More examples: post #2204418, post #2202564. Having the tags split is problematic, though. I've run into it before. Most of the things tagged space print are really starry sky print (including a few of my own uploads, it looks like). So although there is a distinction to be made, in practice it isn't being made so unless we think we can educate everyone it isn't worth having two separate tags.

I think the implication should go the other way, though. Pretty much any starry sky print could be considered a space print, but the reverse isn't really true.

Hmm, that's true. I picked the alias this way because it seemed like space print was less populated than starry sky print, but I think maybe instead it would be better to do an implication from starry sky print to space print as you said.

EDIT: Should I submit a request for that instead? I kind of want to wait until more folks chime in on this issue.

iridescent_slime said:

Most of the starry_sky_print constellation_costume posts don't look very space-like to me. Look at post #1882096; it's just a bunch of white dots and five-pointed stars.

In cases like those I don't think I would even consider that a starry sky print then, I would leave it as just star print. Just my 2c though.

EDIT:Reasoning for this is that a starry sky print has to resemble a starry sky. If you take the print itself as a picture and it looks like a starry sky, then it fits.

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iridescent_slime said:

Most of the starry_sky_print constellation_costume posts don't look very space-like to me. Look at post #1882096; it's just a bunch of white dots and five-pointed stars.

Fair point, but I think it would be marginally acceptable to call that a space print, albeit an extremely stylized one. Or, it could be left off entirely, because constellation_costume is the better descriptive tag. It's not a real starry sky print much more than it is a space one. I don't think star print fits, though, because the stars here are still representative of stars in the sky, not just shapes.

Like I said, I do think there is a distinction to be made, but I don't think we can expect that distinction to be made consistently in practice, so it's better IMO to lose the distinction than to have duplicate tags.

Speaking of constellation_costume, consider constellation_costume -starry_sky_print. Two of them have space print, and at least half of the rest probably should, and fall into the category that both starry sky print and space print could apply to. (I won't fix them for now just so they can continue to serve as examples for this conversation, but I'll try to remember to fix them later.)

☆♪ said:

Fair point, but I think it would be marginally acceptable to call that a space print, albeit an extremely stylized one. Or, it could be left off entirely, because constellation_costume is the better descriptive tag. It's not a real starry sky print much more than it is a space one. I don't think star print fits, though, because the stars here are still representative of stars in the sky, not just shapes.

Like I said, I do think there is a distinction to be made, but I don't think we can expect that distinction to be made consistently in practice, so it's better IMO to lose the distinction than to have duplicate tags.

Speaking of constellation_costume, consider constellation_costume -starry_sky_print. Two of them have space print, and at least half of the rest probably should, and fall into the category that both starry sky print and space print could apply to. (I won't fix them for now just so they can continue to serve as examples for this conversation, but I'll try to remember to fix them later.)

I'm with you there. Although I do dispute that it could be a star print simply because of what I see -- just the pattern of five pointed stars that if I didn't know any better about the costume I would assume to be just that.

It actually came across my mind later in the evening what you said about having it be better to lose the distinction -- but the only way to do that is to alias one tag into the other, or have both be aliased into a common one. I was thinking that we could have a BUR that aliased both starry sky print and space print under a common tag, perhaps, like starry print since they both (well, should, at least) have stars in them -- I can't imagine drawing space without stars to begin with, although someone can counter me on this one.

And on the wiki page we could make clear that these tags were both combined for the sake of losing this distinction, albeit at a marginal price because of losing said distinction -- that even though there are tags for both starry sky prints and space prints, such a distinction isn't made consistent enough, and can be potentially misleading to taggers.

Thank you all for this discussion though, this is definitely quite an interesting problem to tackle.

I don't really like "starry print" as a tag name; seems too similar to "star print" and wouldn't be self-explanatory if you just saw it on the side of a post. Ultimately, since we are knowingly loosing a distinction, we may have to live with just picking one of the current tags and accepting that it's a little off for some of the cases. (But I may have a better idea. See below.)

The primary (only?) distinction between a starry sky and space is the tint and twinkle provided by the atmosphere. (A starry sky is, after all, a view of space.) When printed on clothing, this distinction can't necessarily be made anyway. But I think with the print tags, the real distinction to be made is how stylized the celestial features are. post #2536659 is a(nother) good example of what's clearly a starry sky print but doesn't look anything like space. The more realistic ones, which I think is most of them, could fairly be called either. Starry sky is probably the more popular terminology because Japanese artists tend to use 星空, rather than e.g. 宇宙, to refer to the print.

Here's another option, maybe: have space print implicate starry sky print, so that the starry sky version can be used to make sure you're not missing anything, but the space version could be used to particularly single out more elaborate versions. We would change the semantics of the space print tag (and add a wiki page) so that it should only be added when the print has celestial bodies other than stars, a perspective that you wouldn't get from a normal night sky on Earth, or whatever. It would be a judgement call to some extent, but that's okay, and everything would have starry sky print so we aren't losing anything. How does everyone feel about that?

☆♪ said:

I don't really like "starry print" as a tag name; seems too similar to "star print" and wouldn't be self-explanatory if you just saw it on the side of a post. Ultimately, since we are knowingly loosing a distinction, we may have to live with just picking one of the current tags and accepting that it's a little off for some of the cases. (But I may have a better idea. See below.)

The primary (only?) distinction between a starry sky and space is the tint and twinkle provided by the atmosphere. (A starry sky is, after all, a view of space.) When printed on clothing, this distinction can't necessarily be made anyway. But I think with the print tags, the real distinction to be made is how stylized the celestial features are. post #2536659 is a(nother) good example of what's clearly a starry sky print but doesn't look anything like space. The more realistic ones, which I think is most of them, could fairly be called either. Starry sky is probably the more popular terminology because Japanese artists tend to use 星空, rather than e.g. 宇宙, to refer to the print.

Here's another option, maybe: have space print implicate starry sky print, so that the starry sky version can be used to make sure you're not missing anything, but the space version could be used to particularly single out more elaborate versions. We would change the semantics of the space print tag (and add a wiki page) so that it should only be added when the print has celestial bodies other than stars, a perspective that you wouldn't get from a normal night sky on Earth, or whatever. It would be a judgement call to some extent, but that's okay, and everything would have starry sky print so we aren't losing anything. How does everyone feel about that?

That's definitely true -- such a tag name isn't really intuitive to use. We will probably have to agree to implicate one over the other, since at least that way one of them will be a superset of the other.

And yeah, it's as you say. Japanese artists use 星空 much much more than 宇宙 to refer to the print. If you actually look deep enough on pixiv for 星空ドレス or search 星空ドレス 宇宙 there's actually a fair number of entries that do depict both the cosmos and feature some sort of a starry sky dress.

What you suggested sounds like a good plan to me. Although one might argue the semantics of how a depiction of "space" isn't really always the depiction of a "starry sky", I think in cases like these they should be handled specially -- and in this case it would have to be by appearance. In actual fact we don't know if you can really call a starry sky print a depiction of the sky, however much it looks like one. You have to have a reference point to being on the surface of a planet somehow, since that's how skies are defined. A sky is, at least by the popular definition, the point of view that depicts space from a planet's (namely Earth's) surface.

At least this way, if we know taggers to be using starry sky print but aren't aware that space print is also used for any sort of starry sky print that also depicts larger celestial bodies such as planets and nebulas, we can at least garden those tags and it won't turn out terribly awkward the way it is right now. I suppose one of us will have to make the new implication request though, but I think it's a good idea. Wonder what others think.

Ricetaffy said:

Wonder what others think.

Maybe they got tired of reading our walls of text. :P But I'm still having fun!

@iridescent_slime Do you have an opinion? On this:

Here's another option, maybe: have space print implicate starry sky print, so that the starry sky version can be used to make sure you're not missing anything, but the space version could be used to particularly single out more elaborate versions. We would change the semantics of the space print tag (and add a wiki page) so that it should only be added when the print has celestial bodies other than stars, a perspective that you wouldn't get from a normal night sky on Earth, or whatever. It would be a judgement call to some extent, but that's okay, and everything would have starry sky print so we aren't losing anything.

Ricetaffy said:

I can't imagine drawing space without stars to begin with, although someone can counter me on this one.

It's actually quite common to have views in space where there are no stars visible, at least in the case of photographs. If a bright nearby object (like the sunlit face of the Earth or Moon) is present in the frame, the stars tend to be washed out, resulting in an apparently featureless black background. Apollo astronauts also noted that it was nearly impossible to see stars from the surface of the moon for the same reason. Artists seem to be divided on whether to draw stars in scenes like this, since realism frequently takes a backseat to aesthetics.

Views like these aren't typical of clothing designs, mind you, so this has no bearing on discussion of the starry sky print tag. It's just a neat diversion.

☆♪ said:

@iridescent_slime Do you have an opinion? On this:

I could get on board with that implication. Treating space print as a subset of starry sky print makes it easier to search for both while preserving the distinctness of designs that feature galaxies and planets. +1

It's pretty easy in my eyes: The designs are pretty similar, they both are featuring some kind of starry sky prints.
But not every space print is a starry sky print, because they have a disction which is the presence of planets and/or galaxies. So that would make them indeed a subset of the starry sky print tag.
That said: The designs are to distinctive for an alias, but also very close, so that an implication makes sense.

Seems we're in consensus then. I suppose someone will have to create the implication request though. I'd do it but I'm on my phone right now though, so I'm afraid I might make a mistake.

And to iridescent slime, thanks for the follow up! That's an interesting fact. I guess you learn something new everyday, although I suppose a starless (no visible stars) space would moreso appear in works that solely focus on accurate depictions of the cosmos, not necessarily prints like these.

+1 to space print implicating starry sky print

EDIT: Friend let me borrow his laptop, just so I could do this for a second.

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