SolarMonkey

And this is why I’m sterile.

I don’t want to be here, and I sure as shit don’t want to do that to someone else.. plus I don’t want to take care of some miniature asshole version of myself; I’m bad enough to deal with.

Food related patterns would be pretty strong indicators for me as well, I think.

I only eat after 4pm (sometimes only from 6-10 or so) and people comment when I actually eat earlier than that, especially breakfast. I almost never use condiments or salt (I’m on a very low sodium diet and have been most of my life; I don’t use salt outside of baking, and that’s half salt). Give my dopple unsalted fries and you’ll know right away.

Drinks would work well for me as well - coffee made a very specific way, or room temp water, mostly (I actively dislike cold and hot water).

(I’m just speculating for fun here)

Based on the sash, this is a woman celebrating a birthday or bachelorette. Due to the pattern on it I’m leaning toward birthday, as bachelorette sashes tend to be solid white.

She’s probably hammered, having been day drinking since 10AM (that’s what those sashes are for; to give lunch goers a clear visual warning sign.) and based on the shadow line and assumed time of year (I’m just assuming it’s not northern California in winter, but it might be) that is probably like 4-5pm, so she’s been drunk for a solid while, probably in the sun.

So very drunk, good mood woman gets an idea that twerking poolside (very possibly to no music or music played off a shitty phone) is the way to keep the party going (a shockingly common sort of happening at those two categories of sash-wearing events). And for that one guy, far far too old to have any shame left about being a creep, she’s absolutely right.

This makes me wonder, though, if those dumb attention seeking sashes exist outside of the us (baseball hat in background seems to indicate US).. I’m sure they must in some form, but I really sort of hope it’s just here that people are so self absorbed as to think a birthday or wedding is a free pass to be a public disaster. (Also there used to be a trend of wearing a sash so strangers would staple money to it, but thankfully that seems to have died..)

I’ve had this a lot. I’m almost 40, live alone, and never married, but I often get stuff addressed to “Mr and Mrs solarmonkey”.. as a bonus, since my dad’s generation there have been zero new men with that last name (only girls from my dad and his brothers).

I love getting junk mail addressed to my mortgage co-signer, though. He has never lived here. Sometimes they address me with his last name, which is pretty funny (it’s my step-dad, and my mom died years ago, so we really don’t have much of a relationship at this point, and definitely don’t share a last name).

I like throwing that stuff directly in the recycling. If you don’t even know who I am that makes my job really easy.

No you weren’t being unreasonable. They absolutely weren’t trying to help you out of the kindness of their heart, they were trying to seamlessly get your info by just keeping the conversation moving, and not asking if you -want- to sign up, to which yes or no are the only answers. When they ask for your number it’s weird to answer as though they asked a yes or no question, and that’s intentional.

I’ve worked retail, I was trained on canvassing sales (just trained, I quit before I started because it was super shady tactics I wasn’t comfortable with), that tactic is 100% intentional to get the info without you thinking about it. Some places even give bonuses if the employees sign up a certain number of people. Nothing altruistic about any of it.

When you don’t follow their script they get confused.. because it’s a script. Not because they think you are mad; they don’t care about you as long as you don’t yell at them. You are just nameless face #545 of the day.

Whenever someone asks for my number or email I smile and tell them “oh, I don’t have an account with you, and I really don’t want one, but thank you all the same.” It’s direct and maybe a bit rude to some people, but they typically apply whatever discount anyway, and if they don’t, meh.

If they ask for zip code or address, I tell them they don’t need it, and with those I will get rude if I get pushback. This includes when I call for product support or something and just have a question. “No, you don’t need to know anything about me to answer my questions, and I won’t be providing it unless I feel you need it, regardless what you think or what your system says.”

Nor archive.ph, which appears to be the same site? Idk how that works. Definitely not a site anyone should go to, though.

I block those texts because yeah the stop thing doesn’t ever send confirmation, so I doubt it works.

Haven’t gotten any emails though, thankfully.

There was some legit talk among the wealthy a while back about how to control their ~~slaves~~ servants.. and the idea of bomb collars was floated…

I can’t find the article at the moment (I’ll edit when I do because I’m still looking but my app tends to crash if I wait), but this is all totally on the up and up and it’s really fucking depressing that there are so many articles now about doomsday bunkers for the ultra wealthy… like they could have just pumped that money into fixing things but they don’t want to.. sociopaths.

Edit- found it faster than I thought!

https://archive.ph/l3Djh

I don’t have a minds eye for something to fade from, so that question doesn’t really make sense to me. I have my eyes and then when I close my eyes it’s either black or eyelid colored, nothing else, and I’m super unclear what seeing things in your mind is supposed to be like. Tho I do have super-vivid visual dreams these days (which did not happen until my late 20s, but aren’t at all uncommon for people with aphantasia) and because I only have open-eye sight and these dreams that seem totally real, I frequently have to ask people if things actually happened. It’s very disconcerting, but my understanding is that dreams are not really the same as waking minds eye anyway.

Rather than a visual representation, I’ll have a verbal description ready as soon as I see an item. So for the ball example, I’d know the ball is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”. It probably serves the same function as a visual representation, although perhaps with a bit more required specificity. I don’t really describe things to myself unless I need to, though, so I guess my thinking is sort of abstract. I know the traits something has, and can recall them, but typically don’t explicitly list them unless I’m describing for someone else.

One perk of this is I’m great at describing things I’ve seen or made up, a downside is I’m terrible when people describe things to me. Since I’ve never seen the thing being described, it is a super arbitrary list of usually non-specific features and I don’t care at all. I skip clothing descriptions in books, for example. Don’t care. But when I describe things, even made up things, I’ll run through a list of the features it needs as a minimum to be the object for my mind, which is usually vivid detail for others, as the ball example above.

Idk if I see things differently eyes-open, I don’t really think so, but that’s always been a curiosity of mine since there’s literally no way to know what other people see. I have mild impairments as a result of not being able to visualize, like I’m largely face blind - I have to pick out specific features and traits and use the combination as identifiers. I get a ton of false positives, and almost everyone “feels familiar”. Beyond that, I’m pretty sensitive to colors and patterns. Idk.

But the -way- you ask that first question makes me curious; If you close your eyes and intentionally picture something other than the ball, would you then be unable to tell me what color it was in your example? Do you, personally, require the visual representation to “know” the object?

Not really, but typically if I can see someone else do a motion I can self-insert the movements I’d need to make to duplicate it, so that might just be a disused function for me.

Although that’s a good question, because I do have special memory that I use for a lot of things, and it involves movement, but maybe not in the same way someone else would (eg I can count the windows in my place by simulating a walk through my house and “opening windows” like I do on nice mornings, but I often forget about out-of-the-way non-opening windows because they aren’t part of my muscle memory)

I’m aphantasic. You can say “picture this” followed by whatever you like. It’s not possible for me in any way. Growing up I honestly thought “picture this” or “close your eyes and see” was just metaphor. I legitimately didn’t understand other people can see things.

My mind has a verbal descriptive stream, and I’m good with muscle-based or proprioceptive spacial memory, and the two combine to handle most things, but nothing visual. So like I can easily describe things from memory or from an idea, and it’ll be fully consistent, but not something I see.

If you have aphantasia, and not just hypophantasia, it makes no difference how much detail is provided, there’s a total, fundamental, inability to visualize things.

As a kid I would hear “save big money” and would often show a person next to oversized money (like cartoon people next to giant dollars and coins).

I was absolutely under the impression it meant large scale money and found it confusing anyone would want that. It would be so inconvenient!

I’m not sure when I figured it out but it wasn’t an “a-ha!” moment, it just sort of gradually fell out of my brainmeat.