harm to children

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 20:59:56 GMT

Related to some observations from the last spate of book posts: wow, uh, the way we treated kids as recently as a century ago seems incredibly fucked?

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aphantasia

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 17:52:25 GMT

Some number of years ago I stumbled on this blog post, "I don't see anything when I close my eyes".

The author says that he can't mentally "see" objects in his mind—for instance, if asked to imagine a red square, while he knows intellectually what it looks like, he can't really imagine/see it unless it's in front of him.

I found this fascinating to stumble upon, because I thought this was how everyone was. When people talked about seeing a picture in their mind, I thought it was just kind of a figure of speech, but this dude's post + various anecdata indicates most people actually do this, and I'm the weird one for not being able to picture things!

Anyway, this week I found a couple cool articles on this topic! Turns out researchers are starting to look into this, which I find exciting, because it seemed like such a tricky and quirky thing to study that we'd never get actual scientists on it, and yet here we are. Also it has a name now: "aphantasia."

Also, another person reports he's also unable to mentally "hear" music, which is fascinating to me. I can hear music in my mind, quite vividly, and have composed whole songs that way; it feels weird that not everyone can do this.

Other tidbits:

* I'm really curious if there are any good artists with visual aphantasia. I actually liked art a lot as a kid and drew lots up through middle school, but I wasn't excellent at it. I imagine with more training/effort I could've become good, but I wonder if I'd eventually hit difficulties once I got to Serious Business stuff? Like, I can imagine composing music without being able to hear music in the mind, but it'd be a huge pain in the ass, you'd be pretty reliant on synthesizer-like tools to experiment with sounds, and I imagine not having the ability to turn over different approaches in your mind would make iterations/improvements harder. But maybe not!

* Amusingly, I think this explains why I found it so impossible to find an approach for meditation that worked for me. A bunch of meditation guides have stuff like "start by imagining a white dot in your mind," and I think that was supposed to be the easy part, but I would get stuck there, trying and trying to conjure up a thing in my mind that just was not happening. Once I read a guide on walking meditation it all made much more sense.

Also if anyone else shares this experience let me know, because I'm super curious, join the aphantasia club etc etc

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omfg

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 07:58:03 GMT

okay i just got home from work + vidya games with a friend and OH GOD I HAVE SO MUCH CODE TO WRITE TOMORROW and thus i have no time to actually read/comment/catch up but

my reading page is full of posts with like 15+ comments rn and this makes me so happy <3

please continue being your amazing selves, that is all

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GUYS

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:27:16 GMT

Robert Downey Jr. rumored to play Leonardo Da Vinci in Assassin's Creed movie

!!!!

ALSO MICHAEL FASSBENDER IS STARRING TOO???

this is already sailing well above my Minimum Hot Dude Quota

also I didn't even know they were making an AC movie homg

someone please cry and fangirl with me

(i'm 80% certain the movie will be dumb as hell, because let's get real the source material is not exactly Shakespeare, but it can be stylish and fun and that's all I really need)

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Lost in Lualand

harm to children

aphantasia

omfg

GUYS