thinking about making some sort of...uhh...."fandom" alt page for myself? For lack of a better word. Like just to post about things im watching or reading or whatever and maybe link out to fanart from twitter that I like. i feel like one of the things cohost is missing for me is that sorta thing, but i dont wanna spam my main account with [squints] pictures of the lycoris recoil girls kissing or whatever. i never used tumblr much so clearly i gotta get into true fandom tumblrmode

Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind. ^[1]

did you know that most people can see pictures in their mind just by thinking about them? i didnt until about three years ago. i always thought "mental image" was a sort of metaphor, a shorthand for "thinking of things"

if you ask me to "think of a dog" and then ask me what the dog looks like, the question doesn't make any sense to me. when i tell people this they almost always press me. surely there's some hidden information there, i just don't realize it. "well what color is it?". i dont know! you may as well ask me what breed the word "dog" is. it's a pointless question

i still have an "internal monologue" and obviously i have a memory. but my memories are just facts. i can't tell you the color of the walls of a room i'm not in, unless i've intentionally gone out of my way to remember it or it was notable or relevant in some way. if pressed i could probably draw a floor plan of my apartment from memory, just because that's useful information ive internalized. but i can't tell you what my kitchen counters look like, because they're in a different room and its never mattered

i can recognize people, though maybe with more effort than normal. i'm not faceblind. but if someone is out of my field of view, i can't describe what they look like. i might get some bigger details right - hair color, skin color, height - since those exist in my factual-memory as things ive learned to remember about people. but i dont know details

artists never made sense to me. how do they do that? i cant even draw a still life! as soon as i break eye contact with the reference to look at my paper the image of the scene has disappeared

most of the time, i feel like i'm missing out. maybe the fact that i do so well at algorithmic tasks is because of the weird way my brain has decided to compensate? but there's no way to know
my memory overall is quite bad, which i think is related. i wish i had an imagination. i wish i was more creative. i wish i remembered what my girlfriend's face looks like

ok, that's my musing. feel free to ask me questions or whatever you'd like. i like talking about aphantasia in public because invariably it'll make someone else have a realization, and their life will make a little more sense

when you try to open a new tab and then the tab crashes and then when you refresh the crashed tab a new page pops up forcing you to restart firefox to apply an update after which it forgets the new tab you were opening and you have remember to open it a third time

this setting is literally a lie. it's "we'll hold your browser hostage until you can't not install them"