#seeing faces in clouds

[marlynnofmany]

Seeing Faces

It’s rare when we get a shipment to deliver that’s not packaged somehow — either in Earth-standard boxes, another world’s version of shipping crates, or a livestock pen of some kind. Even that bunch of alien trees had been thoroughly wrapped at the bottom. But this collection of machinery parts didn’t have so much as a layer of cling-wrap on it. I guess the owners figured these things were sturdy enough not to need it.

They were probably right. The metal chunks were heavy. I tried to guess what they were made for as Blip and Blop muscled the biggest ones onto a hover sled, clearing the way for Paint and me to gather up the smaller pieces. Captain Sunlight bid the customer farewell and shut the cargo bay door.

“I think these look like vertebrae,” I said to Paint. “Greasy vertebra. Ew. I’m going to need a new shirt.” The offworld engine oil of whatever didn’t seem acidic at least, so that was nice. I sighed about the black smears.

“Strange vertebrae,” Paint said, juggling her own armload of odd shapes that didn’t seem to be rubbing off on her orange scales. Not that I was jealous or anything. “There would need to be a dual spinal cord.” She tapped a claw on one of the holes.

“Hm, yeah. There are probably animals like that,” I said. “Or robots, as the case may be.”

Ahead of us, Captain Sunlight opened the door to the appropriate storage hold, then headed off on captainly business. It was impressive how different a vibe she gave off compared to Paint, for all their physical similarities. Both were little lizardy people, but one strode with her lemon-yellow head held high, every inch the authority figure, while the other was Paint. She somehow bounced when she walked, even when weighted down by unwieldy metal things.

“I’ll bet these stack really well,” Paint said. “They look like they interlock. We could probably build a spinal column without them falling over.”

“We probably could,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to be the one responsible for bending one of the flanges because we wanted to test it out.”

“Hm. Yep yep yep. But I maintain that we could.”

“We could.”

The two of us entered the storage hold to find Blip and Blop racing to see who could unload the sled faster. It’s not that the Frillian twins were overly competitive, but they were twins. They’d apparently hatched at the same time, and had been in a low-key competition to see who was better at life ever since. But they smiled while they did it.

“Done!” Blip declared, setting down a lump of metal big enough for Paint to hide behind. She raised her hands in triumph, fins fluttering.

“Doesn’t count,” Blop said as he put down his own piece. “You didn’t line them up right. Mine are tidier.”

They squabbled about this while Paint and I unloaded our metal chunks nearby. I had to kneel to keep from dropping the things. It would be just my luck if they did warp on impact, or bounce off each other and whack me in the shin.

The Frillians took their debate out the door before I finished. They’d already moved on to who could steer the hoversled with the minimum of touching.

“Ha,” Paint said. “They do stack.”

I turned to see only one of the things set on top of another, with Paint ready to catch it if it slid. She took it down before I could say anything.

I just nodded and arranged my own into a reasonable huddle, then wiped my hands on my shirt. It was only when I moved toward the door, with a look back at the big pieces, that I got a good look at the one that Blop had set on its side.

This was the logical place to put it, not sticking out past the rest, but the thing that caught my attention was the shape when seen from this angle. Those two holes could have been eyes, and the flanges were shaped like stubby arms. There were even a couple slots in the middle like nostrils.

I burst out laughing.

“What?” Paint demanded.

“It looks like Zhee!” I said, pointing. “Big bug eyes and everything!”

“What does?” Paint asked. She came to stand next to me, following my arm, but just looked confused. “Where are the eyes?”

“These!” I said, stepping closer and pointing at the holes. “And those are the arms. Isn’t it perfect?”

Paint cocked her head as if slightly tilted vision could unlock the answers. “Arms?”

I repeated myself, but she still looked lost, so I found a notepad and pencil in a storage cupboard —reliable even when the batteries all run out — and sketched what I saw.

“Ohh, I get what you mean now,” Paint said when I showed her. “Those parts are lifted like pincher arms, and those are roughly the same proportion as Mesmer eyes.”

“Yeah, it’s uncanny,” I said.

Paint took the notepad to study it closer. “How did you even notice that?”

“It was pretty easy,” I told her. “It just jumped out at me when I looked from the right direction. Like seeing faces in clouds, you know?”

Paint’s blank expression said that she didn’t know.

“Do you not do that? Find patterns of familiar shapes in random things?”

“No?” she replied. “Is that a thing I’m supposed to be doing?”

“You don’t have to! It’s just something that everybody does on Earth, ever since we’re kids. It’s probably from a long history of watching for camouflaged predators in the bushes. You’ve got camouflage on your planet, right? You must.”

“Yeah, sure,” Paint said easily. “But I guess not that much. I’ve never seen a face in a cloud; that sounds terrifying.”

“Not really; it’s more like feeling smart for spotting something. Well,” I amended. “It could be a little unsettling if you see a skull or something. But that’s rare. There are whole systems of divination about this sort of thing.”

Paint looked like she was about to ask a million questions, but right then the sound of familiar clicking footsteps tapped down the hall.

“Zhee!” Paint called, whirling with the notebook in her hand. “Zhee, look what Robin saw!”

Zhee came into view looking just as eyecatching and purple as usual, halting at the doorway while Paint eagerly explained the conversation we’d just had. Quickly and enthusiastically. With lots of waving the sketch around, and pointing back at the machine part.

I felt like apologizing as he stared with an unreadable alien expression. His antennae weren’t even moving; I couldn’t tell what he thought of it all.

Finally Paint finished talking. “She says it’s probably because her species watches for predators in the bushes. Isn’t that amazing?”

Zhee made a point of looking slowly from the sketch to the metal thing, then to me. I braced myself for judgement.

Instead, Zhee raised his pincher arms into the same pose and declared, “I am the danger that lurks in the bushes.” Then he slunk out of sight, many legs scuttling in a quickstep way that he knew darn well I found creepy.

Paint blinked at the empty doorway, still holding the notebook.

“Aw, man,” I said. “He’s picking things up from Trrili.”

Paint immediately closed the notebook. “We definitely shouldn’t show her.”

“Agreed!” I said.

After a moment of thought, Paint tore the page out and handed it to me, then took the notebook back to the cupboard. I pocketed it with a final glance at the metal vertebra that looked remarkably like a cartoonish Mesmer squaring up for battle.

Someone had left a roll of no-residue marking tape on a box nearby. I grabbed a strip and stuck it onto the metal, with the ends curved up.

Now the thing had a goofy grin that possibly no one would recognize. But if there were any humans on the receiving end of this delivery, they ought to get a good laugh out of it.

~~~

The ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book. More to come! And I am currently drafting a sequel!

[myhauntedsalem]

Seeing Faces in Clouds, Inanimate Objects, and Other Related Phenomena

Over the past couple decades, there have been random news stories about people who swear they see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in various objects. Two years ago there was a story about a man who swore the Virgin Mary was coming to him through showing her image in a reflected pattern of Christmas lights on his living room wall. Back in 2006, a man in Texas claimed the face of Jesus was etched into the bottom of his frying pan. There was also a woman who believed the Virgin Mary had blessed her grilled cheese sandwich with her holy face.

Essentially, seeing faces in clouds is a rather uplifting experience for the person experiencing this phenomenon. This phenomenon can be linked to something known as spiritual synchronicity. Synchronicity is defined as an experience of two seemingly unconnected messages that when put together are of great significance. This is actually a Jungian concept, but it is something that spiritual people attribute to one’s “spiritual awakening.” Again, synchronicity could be explained away with pure psychology, but it brings into question “is there any such thing as coincidence or is it actually fate?”

A great example of spiritual synchronicity is the experience of seeing the same number repetitively. The 11:11 phenomenon is a popular one among new agists, and you probably have heard of the 23 phenomenon due to modern pop culture (the movie Number 23, among other works). In fact, there are people whom I am rather close to who hold spiritual significance to certain numbers. If they see this number, this indicates that something good is going to happen or that they are making the right decision. If they do not see the number or see a number opposite to it, they are making the wrong decision. This is a more frequent occurrence than most people even realize. Perhaps you have a favorite number or “lucky number”, too? This is merely the same thing as perceiving faces in clouds or seeing messages in inanimate objects. Feeling luck or attributing meaning to a number is the same thing.

For thousands of years, shamans have walked this earth. There are shamans from pretty much every culture on this planet. Shamans are put simply – wise men and women. They are believed to have spiritual abilities, i.e. they can see into the future or travel to other planes of existence. They can have dreams of the future, but they also employ tools from nature in order to see messages from the spiritual side. This is many times called divination and can be seen in the ritual of “throwing bones”, in which a shaman tosses a set of bones onto the ground and “interprets” the images seen in the pattern of the bones.

Tea leaf readings are used in the same manner, and inevitably is the reader’s experience of the images seen from the random patterns of inanimate objects. Clouds are also interpreted by some in a manner of divination known as “cloud scrying”. So when we see faces in the clouds are we actually calling upon an ancient method of contacting the spiritual plane?

But to play devil’s advocate (the psychologist), all of these shamanistic practices could be considered a form of apophenia or pareidolia…seeing significance in otherwise logically insignificant objects.

Many psychologists explain this type of phenomenon away with the term apophenia. Apophenia is defined as “seeing messages or meaning in random, meaningless objects.” To those who do see these faces in the clouds and messages on inanimate objects, these images do not see like purely random or meaningless. In fact, these images seem like divine messages in many ways. That’s where the spiritual collides with the psychological. There can be much discrepancy between spirituality and psychology, especially in this type of phenomenon.

But if we were to subscribe to the psychological concept of the “faces in clouds” phenomenon, we might also come across the theory that this experience is a sign that is a precursor to schizophrenia. For example, paranoid schizophrenics are said to experience delusions and hallucinations. These delusions are thoughts that have no real meaning or relevance in reality, but to the person experiencing these delusions…they are quite real and meaningful. So essentially, seeing faces in clouds and attributing a spiritual significance to them could indicate that one is schizophrenic or potentially heading in that direction.

Pareidolia is similar to apophenia, as it again is the experience of a person finding meaning or significance in a random stimulus. Often pareidolia is linked to religious images but has also been linked to dead celebrities (i.e. Elvis Presley seen in the clouds or in other objects in nature).

Even though apophenia and pareidolia are described as an experience that is rather common, they are also portrayed as a psychological concept that could quickly indicate the presence of other problems in one’s brain. There is a thin line between a fleeting experience of apophenia or pareidolia and schizophrenia, just as there is a thin line between madness and genius. In observing and researching the artistic aspect of apophenia and pareidolia, we can see that many artists experienced this phenomenon of seeing significance in inanimate objects and meaningless patterns.

[priceofreedom]

Painful memories

[smovs]

sketches & screenshot studies for my Barret gold saucer date rewrite

[demigod-of-the-agni]

BREAKING NEWS: make sure this guy wins a card game competition so that he may SMILE and HUM THE VICTORY FANFARE TO HIMSELF

[ratatatastic]

"And to think we went this whole time without knowing these things"

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Flashback, warm nights.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[wanderingrestlessly]

i think the first time viktor ever laughs in front of jayce - and i mean full body, tears in his eyes, laughter that feels like it genuinely healed something in you kind of laughter - *thats* when jayce consciously realizes he's in love with viktor

[lemonycranberries]

there's a bunch of parallels to be made between wicked and mo dao zu shi, as many people have already pointed out (see: these reddit posts, these animatics). but i was thinking about how wangxian's roles in comparison to elphaba and glinda can be considered to reverse over time. i mostly see people comparing wwx to elphaba and lwj to glinda, and sure, there's a lot of comparisons to be made there, but try to consider another angle.

in the cloud recesses, when they're teenagers, lan wangji is a disciplined, hardworking, intelligent student with a lot of pressure put on him to honor his family and their reputation, beloved by his teachers but witout any friends around his age, except perhaps for his brother; much like elphaba. meanwhile, wei wuxian isn't exactly the most dedicated disciple, and breaks quite a few rules without caring about it, which doesn't exactly make his teachers love him, but at the same time, he's popular and loved by his colleagues (who mostly dislike lan wangji, either finding him a sort of teacher's pet or being afraid of him); in that sense, he's more like galinda (if we're looking through a queer galinda lens, we can also say both characters are very entrenched in comphet and very oblivious to their same-sex attraction, with galinda supposedly being a boy-crazy, girly girl and wei ying being very flirtatious towards women, and claiming to have been with many of them without even considering the most remote possibility that he could like men too).

but then, let's skip to both pairings in their adulthood. wei wuxian, that formerly popular, charming individual, is now the yiling patriarch, a previously very talented, advanced young man who's considered different from others in his society because of his methods, something that used to make people admire him and then became his downfall; he started to be hunted and blamed for all evil that ever happened, becoming the biggest public enemy in the cultivation world, and a legend of sorts, nearly a mythical figure, the represention of evil itself. at the same time, despite being warned by those who loved him, he didn't back down in doing what he thought was right (also defending a vulnerable and marginalized group that was being ostracized and blamed for doing evil things - the remaining wens - like the animals were), officially cutting all ties with the respected, traditional cultivation circles and running away to the burial mounds, very aware that this would make him be hated and turned into a villain. eventually, after losing people he loved, he started actually leaning into this evil version of him that was publicly known, comitting so called "evil" deeds while stricken by pain, and soon after, he died on hiw own, while the entire world celebrated his death and talked about how he deserved it because of how he'd done certain things, a lof of them not being true (note: both pieces of media begin this way, with the viewers/readers being introduced to the story with celebrations of the main character's death - and in both cases, said character wasn't actually - or permanently - dead). i don't even have to say how extremely similar to elphaba's story his story is in that sense (and you could still find more similarities, like both characters being morally gray or both characters being very attached to their siblings and going at extreme lenghts to protect them; i could go on). now let's look at lan wangji, who used to be that stubborn student disliked by many of his peers. in the current time, he has become hanguang-jun, a strong authority figure, respected by everyone in the cultivation world and widely considered an example of righteousness and Good. always very put together, always elegant, always where the chaos is; he's often resolving conflicts and is looked upon and admired as someone trustworthy and strongly virtuous. he was offered the chance to join wei wuxian in what he was doing at the burial mounds, years ago, but he declined, which led to him only being capable of helplessly watching from afar as the person who mattered the most to him grew to be more and more misunderstood by society at large, and consequentially, more and more hated - and persecuted. he was then forced to watch as the entire world celebrated the death of said person, never learning the truth about what had actually happened and who he actually was. does this remind you of anyone?

so basically, what i mean is that teen wei wuxian, a popular, likeable, enjoyer-of-life (or perhaps dancer-through-life) galinda, became a brilliant, but villanaized, ostracized and misunderstood wicked witch, like elphaba; while young lan wangji, a disciplined, introverted, hard-working elphaba, grew to be a respected and admired authority figure who was actually in deep suffering because of the way he lost the person he loved - not unlike our gal glinda, the good.

[mumblesplash]

see the interesting thing is that while 'Al art' continues to improve aesthetically it also continues to be made by and for people who don't actually *create* art, just *look* at it. and it's been so interesting to watch, because it's such a wild insight into what people who don't draw are seeing when they look at pictures, what they care about, what they don't notice.

some things (faces, eyes, lighting, hands) have been pretty much perfected, or at least reached a point where they don't 'look wrong' upon first glance, but i still have yet to be surprised to find out an image was Al-generated because there's such a clear lack of artistic process behind any of it. if you look at any part of the 'art' and ask yourself 'why and how would someone draw this like that' there's never an answer. there's nothing there.

[lifemod17]

The first sunset of October

[arctixout]

HFJM part 6: due to technical problems the new single won't be out in February

B: so we were being dumb and fooled around next to the laptop with Jan

and we accidentally spilled my coffee on it

and now it won't turn on

so we gotta record the song again

B: so, sorry about that

J: it was Bojan's fault

B: shut up

[heguanshan]

He tian flawlessly skiing with trembling Momo in his arms 😩💞

[samirafee]

#PAREIDOLIA🌥️👽🫥😶‍🌫️🌚

@samirafee

[icewindandboringhorror]

I got these shoes from someone recently but thought they were way too plain looking, so I set out on a quest to customize them with some sharpies and charms and miscellaneous ribbon I had in my craft drawers. Mostly sky themed (clouds, rainbows, rain, stars, etc.) because that's my favorite aesthetic, but I had to include some cat imagery as well, of course lol.

[idekwtf-is-happening]

Damien’s currently getting cancelled on Twitter for *checks to make sure I’m reading this shit right* apologizing for a joke he made five years ago where he mentioned the conflict in Gaza