#our brains are weird

[vole-mon-amour]

.

[h20milk]

old coves and a small derek

[domsaysstuff]

Okay so this idea has been rocking around my empty skull for some time now just we know that Eddie can be a pretty mean DM and a shithead and I've been thinking abt romances in D&D and how it would work in Hellfire

And I had this thought that Eddie would like be "no romances!!" to the Corroded Coffin group (before the kids joined) and they're like why? and Eddie just to tease them says that he doesn't want to pretend to fall for their smelly ugly faces

Which just motivates them to try and seduce like every character that Eddie introduces for a fucking month and it leads to the creation of the rule: Every romance/seduction directed roll must be rolled above 15 to succeed AND if Eddie decides that the attempt is particularly bad the roll is with disadvantage

The Corroed Coffin boys are obviously teasingly like ohhh so we get an advantage if it's good?

"Doubt that would happen boys, but sure, if you make me, Eddie fucking Munson, to blush like a fair maiden then you'll get the advantage on the roll"

They try, they really do, but all the CC boys succeed in doing is killing off all of their party in three sessions and Gareth who is a little shit is actually rolling his third character (because the consequences of a failure are fucking brutal) by the time Jeff and [unnamed freak] give up

After that they know better (except Gareth who still sometimes does that just to annoy Eddie and be a little shit) to try and then the kids join Hellfire and Eddie has even less of an desire to flirt with fucking Wheeler, Henderson and Sinclair (they're baby children!!)

But the kids are a little shits too and they see Gareth being a little shit so they copy

It ends badly for them, they gripe about Eddie being unfair because like "all three of us have girlfriends Eddie and you don't so we clearly know more about romance then you do" Dustin not only gets a flick on the head for that but his character might have ended up being put into situations™ throughout the session that are "totally unfair!"

But fair to say all of Hellfire knows the rules and all of hellfire knows that no matter how well they try and how smooth they are (they really aren't ever smooth) Eddie will not blush or even consider they attempts as "good", the best they got was "tolerable" (Lucas got it and he's still very proud of it, as he deserves okay?), Eddie is impossible to fluster and so it's just is this fun thing they sometimes do when they feel particularly like little shits

And that's it about it

Until Vecna and all the upside down shit and the surprising friendship of Eddie and Steve happens

And suddenly Steve Harrington is not only sitting but playing D&D

Everything is going actually pretty good and Dustin practically vibrates out of his chair at how proud he is of Steve for how well he is doing so far and then

And then Steve tries to flirt with a pretty bard

Dustin deflates, he is ready for the absolute disaster that is going to fall upon Steve, he makes eye contact with Lucas - both of them ready with "it was actually a pretty good line tho!" at the tip of their tongues to defend Steve's decisions, he doesn't know Eddie's special rules after all and it would be funny to see Steve fail, sure, but it's Steve's first game and the kids wanted it to be good for Steve so convincing him to play again would be easier

But now Eddie is going to absolutely rip into him and Steve will never want to play again and-

"Roll with advantage" Dustin gasps, audibly, loudly, the room is silent, except for Steve who's very unaware of the chaos he just created and just rolls the dices, his usual confidence in place

And if someone looked closely - and all of the hellfire is fucking looking - Eddie Munson has indeed a light blush on his face

[beastlyidiocy]

[patchworksoda]

It's been a minute! Making myself work through our backlog of half-finished projects before we let ourselves start any new ones so here's our little satyr with her wig finally styled and the base layer on her antlers painted.

Still not sure what to name her, I'm leaning toward something woodsy that would match or at least sound good with Nutmeg.

[ratislatis]

I'll find you. Wait for me.

hee hee hoo hoo AUUUUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH PAIN PAIN SUFFERING PAIN IN ALL DIRECTIONS!!!! TO HELL WITH IT (LITERALLY)!!!!!!!!!

[fumifooms]

Laios Touden and autism; admiring the non-human

Do you think people exaggerate when they scream about Laios being autistic? Do you feel like it’s weird that so many people including autistics are so set on Laios, the problematic (but incredible and kind) king TM, being the most autistic that has ever autisticed? Why do we cheer on autistic people wanting to be monsters?? Isn’t that weird?

Well, of course it depends on the way it’s done, it can be done quite offensively, but long story short Kui blew it out of the park. The thing is, autistic people really do like monsters and animals and robots. Nonhuman does not mean subhuman, it just means Other. Feeling a connection with them has been shown to be an extremely common autistic experience for that very reason.

Because some people don’t understand why we autistic Tumblr Laios stans cheer “autism! Autism!” whenever he talks about monsters and feeling alienated to humans so! Here’s a post about how yes even research papers are analyzing the special connection we form with animals. I’m not even joking but Laios Touden & the mass cries of relatability with autistic people he gets and all the love for him could be used as study material and evidence for future papers because the link is that strong. Oh also I think it’s notable that being autistic and undiagnosed vs diagnosed makes a huge difference. In my experience as someone who was undiagnosed up until 18, it’s even more alienating to not know that there’s a reason why you’re different, being gaslit that you’re ‘normal’ and you just need to try harder and get with the program, etc. Personally when getting diagnosed I went through the 5 stages of grief because the thought of having been fundamentally different all your life (a difference which you will never be able to change) and mistreated for it when you weren’t “wrong” all along makes you unload all the anger and sadness and loneliness and sheer trauma you’ve built up over time. Like it’s world shattering.

So! Back to seeing dogs as family. Also I implore you to value experiential evidence when it comes to autism and other neurodivergences because brains are complicated and neurotypicals not being able to understand us well even with scientific research is like, a whole thing even though we’re right there speaking about how we feel and being right every time because the topic is literally us and how we experience the world. 

Disclaimer for this whole post that, of course, no group is a monolith and everyone has different experiences or can diverge from the norm of the group, and that doesn’t diminish the validity of either side! Like, I know autistic people who have trauma with dogs and hate them. But, trends do happen, and in this case... Autism is very “My experiences with humans make me feel dehumanized in a bad and lonely way so instead I’ll dehumanize myself in a good and inspiring way”.

“I was treated like a failed human my entire life and you’re surprised that my response was to become a dog.” -Patricia Taxxon

It’s literally well recorded that autistic people relate to animals more than humans globally. With this post, besides spreading autistic Laios truthism and explaining why the portrayal hits so deep for so many,  I want to show in what way this is a very specific experience and not looking at his character through an autistic lense really misses a lot of why he’s everything that he is. (Tacking allegedly onto here for legal reasons, different interpretations are valid etc etc /gen). This honestly isn’t super long though.

To define an important term, anthropomorphism in the studies and in this post means to attribute human traits to the nonhuman, which not only includes anthro furry designs but also animals irl, inanimate objects, and animated media as opposed to live action, to humanize them and empathize with them.

Paper: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2019.0027 

“Dogs taught me how to hunt and socialize and work in groups”, Laios having internalized body language... So real so real. I, too, make a great dog impression. And I want to emphase the part that it helps greatly develop a sense of emotions and relationships! For Laios, he didn’t get along with kids his age, it was him, Falin and the dogs against the world. Since it’s a group of dogs too, it taught him group dynamics and social hierarchies (like with Falin being considered as being below the dogs in authority according to the dogs rip), and the importance of group coordination when hunting.

For me, I cannot like, concisely explain just how much animals were important to me developmentally. I also grew up with dogs, but like I vividly remember encounters with like hamsters as well just radically shaping my understanding of boundaries, the importance of giving something space and the way you interact with them and respect their side of it. Unlike humans they don’t really mask how they feel, it’s direct cause-effect reaction and data gathering. There are no words involved, so the focus on having a perfect phrasing and tone is gone, leaving just pure interactions. 

There’s also no reason to mask how you feel either, and you don’t have to feel silly over wanting to form a connection and it showing, what, is the dog gonna laugh at you because you obviously want to make friends with it? Toshiro or Kabru might, but dogs and cats will just tell you to fuck off and leave it there worst case scenario. I often say that I think one reason Marcille is special to Laios and he feels comfortable around her is because she emotes INTENSELY, she gestures, she puts her whole body into it, her facial expressions are pretty exaggerated and her ears even emote too- like with a dog’s ears!

I think there’s def also things to be said about how he gravitated towards Izutsumi at first, all excited, was eager to sleep in the same bed as her, but in the Izutsumi sleep rating chart we see they really just casual and chill so it’s not a Laios talking to Shuro deep into the night situation just a “I like sleeping besides animals” situation and that is enough to hype him up. I love how he pet her in the extra about why Chil let her sleep with him too. He’s just so transparently eager to befriend her, even if in the end they weren’t all that compatible and he accepted that.

There are honestly so many examples I could give for this. Like Grandin the famous cow lady.

More about autism & empathy:

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/double-empathy-explained/ (Also mentions a study in which groups of autistic, allistic then a mixed group played a game of telephone and both singular groups had similar levels of information retention, but the mixed group was significantly worse. As an autistic person yeah duh, obviously autistic people are different from one another and can have plenty of interpersonal issues, but communicating with other neurodivergent people feels pretty intuitive and straightforward and comfortable. One of the reasons why neurodivergent people tend to naturally gravitate towards each other I suppose.) 

^ Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5932358/  For good, extensive summary of why we relate to animals so much you can go to the “anthromorphizing and asd” section of the paper. This paper extends to our widespread liking of cartoons and robots as well. Ok so this is a whole thing I won’t get into here but this is a big reason why a lot of autistic people are agender leaning as well. Genders and queerness in general is a lot about social constructs, and being queer is being marginal to these, not fitting into boxes or challenging those social norms and conventions. Queerplatonic relationships are a great example of this, where the framework of the relationship is platonic but the intangible nature of what it is exactly is the point, not familial not anything but everything at once too, just adoration, I like to say having pets is a bit like it as well, bc obvi it’s not romantic and often not fully familial, very platonic but also sooo much cuddling and adoration and kissing and whatnot that you wouldn’t typically do with a friend or family member. I’ll talk about qpr and labels another day though.

I got carried away but queerness in Dunmeshi is something I 100% want to make a big post on one day. Experiencing the world with different guidelines and not registering things to have the same boxes, sigh. Personally I also relate to Laios on a gender level, “cis by default because I don’t care all that much but if I were to dig deeper I’m probably otherkin and I want to be socially associated with traits of monsters and animalistic rather than man/woman” sighh hard to be a cryptid in this day and age. I wish we had a term like furry but for monsters, I want to be in the fantasy or folk tale genre ty, like changelings. Goshh changelings... You know, the irl myth where people said their neurodivergent kids were fairies’ children instead of human. Diminished physical sense of self means I see myself as some unknowable black  void aesthetic wise, but like in a way that simultaneously makes me feel seen. Like becoming a monster, losing your sense of self but also somehow just being simplified and seen for what you are, it’s weird to try and explain. This post is more about relating to the nonhuman than about seeing yourself as such, but like connect the dots right, that IS an important point of Laios’ character. It’s because our brains literally work different than allistics which makes us feel as other, but also because of social ostracization and functioning in a different way than society at large, living in the margin of society, being weird and non-conforming.

Meanwhile, animals and social norms... Like ok, showing your neck and rolling on the ground to show that you’re friendly and harmless and play biting might not be proper. But have you considered that it’s also fun and feels very intuitive. Play with a dog in the dog’s way I promise it is so nice and freeing. Play tug of war and growl back when they growl. Hiss at your cat to tell them they do something wrong, engage with them on their level.

Autism made social life hard, but it made animals easy. Do you have anyyy idea how good it feels to mask all day every day and feel constantly misunderstood or like you’re doing a performance but then you can just, drop all of that in the company of animals and they understand you. They understand you. You form an understanding and rapport so easily.

And this whole thing with Laios is so explicit too, with the Winged Lion saying “You’re sick and tired of the human world”. Notice the choice of words. Sick and tired of the human world. Exhausted from the constraints, sick of the mind games. It really isn’t as much about loving monsters as it is about loving the nonhuman. Relating to them because you feel that you can actually understand how they work and think, and feeling like they could understand you back as well. Animals are safe.

Like I could go on about how Laios admiring even just demi-humans like orcs is because they’re socially seen as non-humans more than any true physical thing, that they’re not bound by human society and its rules and live with their own lifestyle. But it would deal myself 1000 points of psychic damage and I am not ready to cry today. It’s idealization 100%, and like, Laios DOES want to be treated as human, to be valued, but it feels like an unreachable thing meanwhile becoming a monster is instant gratification and freedom and a sense that now no one will be able to hurt you in a way that reaches you, never again shall you be defenseless, and then if people dehumanize you then that only strengthens your sense of identity as a monster and UGHH ugh ugh.

And like. This post is a mess at this point but if you want to kinda delve into the more “why” then I recommend this Patricia Taxxon video essay. It starts out on a very different topic, but it’s all about autism and finding comfort in the inhuman. Long story short is othering made us like this also animals are just simpler to intuitively get along with.

So when I post this

I mean it. I really mean it when I say he’s me. I have never felt so seen. So many conflicting emotions all wrapped so concisely yet so intangibly woven into the whole storyline so subtly. 

Not being depicted as a monster of an human being for feeling/having felt that way?? The manga understands you. The world can understand you. Other humans can understand you. You can bond with them. You can. And I think that’s a big part of Dungeon Meshi too- Laios opening up to others about how he really is and his interests, and all the bumps on the way but how it was the only way to truly get to know each other and bond. With the climax being Laios confronting head on his complex with monsters and humans, and his monster-loving side and animalistic side being exactly what saves the whole world, what saves humanity. Because Laios does value his friends, does think humanity has beautiful sides to it, he wants to help it thrive and eat and become more accepting, carving out a kingdom for misfits and demi-humans. At the end of it, transforming into a monster and being free is a daydream fantasy, and the reality of it is that Laios does belong in the world as he is, and does receive and give out love.

If you enjoyed this you’ll probably like some of my other Laios analysis!  Here’s an analysis of his succubus and what it says about his relationships with other humans. And here’s an analysis about his relationship with Shuro from his perspective.

[notebooks-and-laptops]

People really be in the OFMD tag saying that Izzy is shifting the blame when he says "we did this to him" because absolutely 0% of eds behaviour was about Stede and all of it was Izzy's fault while Ed... *Checks notes*... Shoots anyone on his crew who mentions Stede by name, refuses to go to land (where he last saw Stede), says "fuck you Stede bonnet" and crashes weddings because he's heartbroken. Right.

[wigglebox]

Watching over you 💙💫 [x]

[blossoms-phan]

this is so incredibly real like i am a dannie to my fucking core that man has entranced me since i was like 11 years old and i will never, EVER get over how how genuinely gorgeous he is in real life. I literally felt the breath get knocked out of me when they ran out for preshow like they’re just SO pretty but dan with his hair and freckles and earring and the way his smile is LITERALLY like staring directly into the sun and the way he moves his body and adjusts his pants and bendy man flirty energy arms out in the boxing outfit everything about sister daniel god I am obsessed with him

[spitblaze]

gnc and butch women (cis AND trans) and transmascs are punished for performing masculinity past certain thresholds of arbitrary attractiveness because people that cishet society categorizes or clocks as 'women' are not supposed to perform masculinity. hope this helps 👍

[sage-nebula]

It happened, as things so often did, like a bolt from the blue on one of Pacifica's rare days off from work at the diner.

It was the height of summer and so hellaciously hot, even for—no, especially for Oregon. Having lost access to the private pools and yachts after her father's investments into Cipher capital during Weirdmageddon four years prior, Pacifica found herself at the Gravity Falls community pool, lounging on a pool chair after layering SPF 50 on her skin, and silently telling herself over and over that it was always morally correct to block her parents' numbers on her days off, and that her father probably hadn't yet found where Pacifica's pet rescue opposum, Susanna, had hidden the bell yet, so there was no need to worry.

(Pacifica had rescued Susanna from the diner kitchen two summers ago, when she was fourteen. Susanna was technically a male oppossum, but something about him reminded Pacifica of Lazy Susan, so Susanna he was.)

But it was at that moment that deep laughter followed by a higher pitched "shut up!" and even more laughter from both voices broke through Pacifica's inner mantras. She opened her eyes to see that both of the Pines twins, having once again made their yearly visit to Gravity Falls, had also chosen to visit the pool that day.

Pacifica swallowed hard.

For all that she had tried to deny it even to herself in her tween and early teen years, by now Pacifica had long since accepted that she found Dipper Pines attractive. It was impossible not to, with the way he came back taller each summer, his shoulders increasingly more broad as he grew into the physique promised by his great uncles (or his Great Uncle Ford, anyway), a little stubble that he "forgot" to shave always left around his chin, and his sideburns. Oh, his sideburns. Pacifica hated how much she loved Dipper's sideburns. It was beyond cringe, and the only other living soul who would ever know about her crush was Susanna, but Pacifica Northwest did indeed have a crush on Dipper Pines. She knew, and accepted, this about herself.

But then, on that hellaciously hot summer day at the community pool, Mabel Pines took her sweater off right in front of Pacifica's eyes.

Mabel pulled her sweater up over her head, and it was as if time slowed down. Mabel's arms were just as toned and strong (if not maybe a little more toned, the way the sunlight hit her muscles) than Dipper's. She had been wearing a bikini under her sweater—a pink one decorated with stars that fit her perfectly—and her thousand watt smile revealed she'd finally gotten her braces off to reveal a set of dazzling teeth. And when she tugged her hair free from her ponytail, it swished around her in a cascade of long, brown waves.

Dipper had thrown his tanktop onto a pool chair, and Mabel followed suit, throwing her sweater and hair tie on top of Dipper's shirt. But as Dipper was in the middle of saying something (they were too far for Pacifica to hear clearly), Mabel whipped back around with devilish speed and shoved him straight in the pool.

Mabel laughed uproariously as Dipper came back up for air, sputtering water and shaking his sopping bangs from his eyes. But he was only off guard for a second, and Mabel's mirth kept her off hers for longer. Dipper grinned wickedly and snapped his fingers around Mabel's wrist, yanking her in headfirst after him. Just as Dipper had before her, Mabel resurfaced immediately, though she had to use both hands to shove her curtains of damp hair out of her face. But her smile was just as impish as Dipper's own, and within seconds they were splashing each other, shrieking and laughing as they caused the biggest ruckus the pool had seen all day.

And as she watched them play, the water making their skin glisten and their smiles making their eyes sparkle, Pacifica felt a swarm of butterflies in her gut and a flash of heat in her face that had nothing at all to do with the summer sun above. She curled in on herself in her pool chair, and tugged her sun hat down over her face.

"Oh no."

[sovereignsystem]

"Even if you're faking, that means something is wrong."

This phrase used to be very comforting to us, because it was meant to teach the lesson of "it's okay to be wrong." But now because of all the shit that Endos have stolen and purposefully changed the meanings of, I can't help feeling gross hearing it, just knowing how Endos can corrupt open-ended phrases like that.

-🧟‍♂️/🧢 (He/him)

[bitchthefuck1]

I don't like Criston and I pray for his downfall daily, but "Rhaenyra rejected him once and he won't get over it" is such a wildly reductive description of the incredibly messy and complicated power and class dynamics going on here that I don't even know where to start. Idk why people seem so incapable of hating on him without warping the story to try and make him look worse. You don't need to do that, he looks plenty bad as-is.

[carionto]

This has probably been transcribed before but I don't know what tags to find it under, so imma just do it again cuz this kind of stuff feels very relevant to know, more evidence that Humans are weird as fuck and our brains just make shit up. [Twitter thread by user named foone as a long image I stumbled upon on Pinterest]: _______________________________

You want to know something about how bullshit our brains are? OK, so there's a physical problem with out eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements. The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

Having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem

You've got some obvious solutions you could do.

make the vision go black during movement. (Some VR games do this!)

just keep showing the last thing we saw prior to movement

Both are good options with different downsides, but OH NO. this is assuming everything makes sense and is chronological and (regular) logical.

Your brain does neither of these options, really.

First, it basically puts your visual system on "pause".

You're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period.

then when you finish your saccade, it shows you what you now see at the new position. and then it pretends it can time travel.

It seriously shows you the image at the new point, but time-shifts it backwards so that it seems like you were seeing it the whole time your eyes were moving.

And because your brain is not a computer with a consistent clock, this shit works.

You can see this effect happen if you watch an analog clock with a second hand.

Look away (with just your eyes, not your head), then look back to the second hand.

It'll seem like it takes longer than a second to move, then resumes moving as normal.

That's because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.

We've known about this effect for over 100 years, it's called "Saccadic masking" and more specifically Chronostasis. Your visual system lies to you about WHEN things happen by up to half a second (!) just to avoid saccades blurring everything.

So while I firmly believe we're basically just overgrown biological computers, we're apparently computers programmed by batshit insane drunkards in Visual Basic 5.

And you might think "hey wait, wouldn't my vision 'pausing' for half a second have all kinds of weird effects on moving objects? why don't they appear to stutter when moving?"

and the answer is simple! your brain has EVEN MORE UGLY HACKS on top of this to avoid you seeing that

If you've got a clock where the second hand doesn't "tick" but instead smoothly rotates, you won't see this. Because your brain recognizes it's moving and adjusts what you see to make sure it sees the "right" thing.

It's only really obvious with periodically moving things like a clock hand, because it's not moving (so not triggering the movement-during-chronostasis hack) but it moves at a set rate, so you can notive that rate appearing to change.

It's tempting to think of your eyes and visual system as a camera just dumping a video feed into your conscious brain but taht's so very, very not the case. What you think you see and what your eyes can actually see are two exceptionally different things.

The big obvious one being the blind spot. Vertebrate eyes are wired backwards so we've got a blind spot in each eye where the enrves enter into the eye. About 6 degrees of your vision in each eye is just not there, as there's no light sensitive cells there.

Do you see a blind spot, right now? No, you probably don't. Close one eye! There's now no way for the other eye to fill in the gaps. Still, no blind spot… Your visual system is lying, and making up content it thinks is there. You literally cannot see what you think you see.

Here's another one: You can see in color, right? (well, some of you can't. Sorry) You can see in color all throughout your vision, it's color everywhere?

Well, most of the cone cells (Which are sensitive to color) are in the fovea, a little spot in the center of your vision.

So outside of that center-of-vision spot, you have very little color perception. There's some but it's very limited compared to your main color vision. But I bet if you shift your attention to your peripheral vision right now, it's in color.

Your vision system is lying. It's remembering what colors things are and guessing and filling in the gaps. It's basically doing a Ted Turner colorization process on your non-central vision.

There's even weird effects like what's called "Action-specific perception". If you get a bunch of white balls of various sizes and toss them at people then ask them to estimate the size of the balls thrown at them, they'll have a certain size estimate, right?

Now repeat the experiment but ask them to try to hit the balls back with a bat, and suddenly all the estimates shift larger. They actually see the ball as bigger because they need to hit it. Their vision is exaggerating it to make it easier to see!

Which just goes to show, like I said, your vision is not a camera. Perfect accuracy is not one of its goals. It does not give any shits about "objective reality", that's not important.

What's important to the evolution of the visual system is any trick that helps you survive, no matter how "dumb" or "weird" it is.

So if you want an accurate visual representation of what things look like? Use a camera. Not your eyes.

In any case the original point was that while you might know this about your eyes being poor cameras that lie to you, you might still think that at least they're consistent, time-wise. They don't screw with your sense of time passing, just to make up for visual defects. NOPE!

If you can't get it don in time, turn back the clock and pretend you did. That's a perfectly good solution when you're the visual system.

BTW @/hierarchon reminded me of a neat trick with saccadic masking: go look in a hand mirror. No matter how close you bring it to your eyes, and how much you look around, you will never see your eyes move. You're blind during those movements. But you still think you are seeing.

She additionally pointed out that your phone's selfie-mode is NOT a mirror, and it has a slight delaye, so you can see your eyes moving in it.

And for fun, here's wikipedia's example of the blindspot. Stare at L with only your left eye, adjust the distance, and the R will disappear. You don't see "nothing" or "black", you see the background, because you expect to.

This is why laser damage your retina can be so insidious. Your visual system already can hide "holes" in your vision, what's one more to hid? So you damage a small spot of your retina and your visual system covers it up.

But since you didn't go "WELL THAT WAS TERRIBLE I BETTER TAKE BETTER CARE OF MY EYES" and stop fucking with lasers, you keep doing it. Eventually you accumulate so much damage that your visual system simply cannot manage hiding it all and your vision rapidly degrades.

The other reason lasers are so dangerous is that they don't necessarily trigger the same responses as regular incoherent light. Your pupil reflex is only triggered by some special cells in the center of your eye, so an off-center laser might not cause your iris to contract.

And infrared laser light is just as dangerous as visible laser light, but can't trigger your blink reflex. Your eyes automatically close when exposed to bright light, but they can't detect infrared light. Despite not seeing it, it still causes damage.

Anyway, back on how amazing and crazy your vision is: There was an experiment back in 1890 where someone wore glasses made with mirrors in them to flip their vision. After about 8 days, they could see just fine with them on. Their vision system had started "flipping" the image.

(I say flipping in quotes because it's not as simple as it started showing the pixels at the top row on the bottom row, cause our vision doesn't work like that) It only took them a few hours to get back to normal after taking these glasses off, though.

The last really fun part about this flipping experiment: your eyes already do it. Based on how our vision is wired, we should be seeing everything upside down.

We don't, but only because our visual system has had a whole life to adapt to this.

BTW, since a few people have brought it up: There's a great sci-fi novel by Peter Watts called Blindsight. In it humans encounter an an alien race they call Scramblers, who can move very fast and precisely, and they exploit saccades.

Because if they only move during saccades, we never see them moving. And since so much of our vision is based on just filling in what we think is there, if they stay out of the direct center of our vision, we'll just visually fill them in, like they were never there.

Check it out if you're into hard SF stories of first contact. It's got some really neat ideas about human vision, very unique aliens, the future of humanity in the face of perfect VR, and vampires. (Really, it has "vampires", while still being hard-SF)

BTW, remember how I said "vertebrate eyes" up there? Guess who has eyes which are wired forwards instead of backwards (have no blindspot), have an internal lens, and can even see polarization of light? Our good friends the Cephalopods!

[manasurge]

Just a bit of lore relevant vent art (with terrible proportions bc apparently I mess that up horribly when I'm tired ugh. Watch me regret posting this tomorrow. The head size is already driving me mad bc it's too big, and I can feel myself wanting to abort this mission already) of Mourynn just, lying down on top of one of those large elevated Pale Tree roots far above the Grove (and far away from everyone else), and during the time between the early years and before the Personal story. Caithe is gone (Destiny's Edge), Wynne is gone (bc well, y'know...), even Faolain is gone (bc of Caithe in DE), and she's just feeling miserable, lost, and alone. (Her hair is in between her sapling hair and the Zhaitan hair, so it's grown out a bit bc she's depressed, and she's meant to be in the new outfit she designed, but I'm in the process of redesigning it a bit, so I've made a few tentative changes for now. Her collar is now just an extension of her clavicle leaves which can be put up like a collar, or can be draped down over her shoulders or back)