Nikolas Rex's Blog

Why I Love Harry Potter

Many people love Harry Potter for different reasons. I even heard someone once say “I Love the Harry Potter movies!” When I asked them if they preferred the books or [ . . . ]

Board Game Update and TAG

Well I had a quite long but successful play-test of my board game last night. Shout out to TAG (Tri-Cities Area Gaming) and the guys who playtested the game with me.

We didn’t get through an entire play-through, but close enough to call it a full “playtest” play through. There are some definite changes needed to be made to the game to make it “fun”. The mechanics that exist are fairly good, but the main callout for the game is that it doesn’t have enough interesting player decisions to keep the players motivated to play (huge problem). The way the game is currently designed it basically could play itself out (i.e., the players just reveal cards and follow the logical progression of those cards interacting with other cards until the game is over).

Some suggestions to fix this were to change the Colony deck to two different decks (a player’s “Habitat” deck separated from the Colony deck) and to switch the Develop and then Defend step to Develop OR Defend.

I was thinking upon this further and thought of other ways to make interesting player decisions but the more things I think up, the more cascading changes my game would suffer and it’s hard to think if those changes are worth the work. (I mean obviously if the game is fun at the end it will be worth the work, but I have limited passion and time to dedicate to this so I want to use it wisely).

I also did some more mock ups of different brighter card designs, I personally like the ones with almost no color but a subtle gradient outlining the middle of the card. Don’t know yet which design I like best. Well, that’s not entirely true, I like the dark design best, but these other brighter designs are closer to what I can actually achieve art-style wise.

That’s it for this update (more to come soon)

AI Advancements

Is this cool? Or creepy?

Engineers at Google have been working on something new in the A.I (Artificial Intelligence) realm, and… it’s kind of cool.

It’s called Google Duplex, and it’s An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone.

“A long-standing goal of human-computer interaction has been to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other. In recent years, we have witnessed a revolution in the ability of computers to understand and to generate natural speech, especially with the application of deep neural networks (e.g., Google voice search, WaveNet). Still, even with today’s state of the art systems, it is often frustrating having to talk to stilted computerized voices that don’t understand natural language. In particular, automated phone systems are still struggling to recognize simple words and commands. They don’t engage in a conversation flow and force the caller to adjust to the system instead of the system adjusting to the caller.

Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.”

Audio of Duplex Calling a Hair Salon to make an appointment for her client.

Audio of Duplex calling a restaurant to make an appointment for a group of clients.

No these are not humans scheduling appointments, the subtle “uhhh” and “Uhms” found in regular human speech patterns present in these calls is Google Duplex’s complex learning algorithms at work.

Advanced? Yes. Cool? Sure. Creepy? You decide.

More on this news.

Board Game Design Update

I am tentatively calling my game Stellar Colony (Space Colony was taken)

The play-testing process is going pretty well. I have made several necessary changes to the game and every time I feel it gets closer to the finished product.

Here, then, are preliminary designs for my board/card game. I went with a very dark theme but with strong colors. Although this is how I truly want the game to look, the sort of artwork I want featured will be very expensive to commission for each card. This kind of design requires a certain type of very vibrant colorful type of artwork. A kind of artwork that is above my current skill level.

Because of this I am also working on a secondary design profile for the cards, a much brighter and minimalist feel. It will be a kind of design I will be able to match with an artwork style I can achieve without having to commission the artwork from someone else.

I plan to update with those designs when I finish them, for now, enjoy this sample.

Beliefs and the Backfire Effect

You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.

I’m going to tell you some things.

You’re not going to believe these things I tell you.

And that’s okay.

You have good reason not to, you were raised on certain information.

But I need you to keep listening regardless of what you believe.

I don’t care if you’re liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between.

I don’t care if you’re a cat person, a dog person, or a tarantula.

Morning person or night owl.

iPhone or Android.

Coke or Pepsi.

I don’t care.

All I care about is that you read this to the end.

Sound good?

Then let’s begin.

You may have heard that Brigham Young instituted polygamy and was among one of the first polygamists.

Except it isn’t true.

In 2013, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published an essay called, “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo”stating that “The revelation on plural marriage was not written down until 1843, but its early verses suggest that part of it emerged from Joseph Smith’s study of the Old Testament in 1831.” It was, in fact, Joseph Smith who instituted polygamy.

Upon learning this information, I want to ask you something:

How did it feel to learn this new fact about the origins of polygamy?

…

I stated a thing, I provided evidence of that thing, and presumably you now believe in the thing I stated.

Presumably, your belief in Mormon polygamy has changed with little or no friction.

Presumably, the next time you’re at church and polygamy comes up in conversation, you’re going to proudly impart this newfound knowledge to your fellow Mormons.

Yes?

Terrific, let’s continue.

WHAT if I told you that Joseph Smith didn’t just institute polygamy, but he also practiced it himself?

What if I told you that according to the 2013 essay, “careful estimates put the number between 30 and 40”? What if I told you that a number of those women (possibly up to 11) were married to other men, making Joseph Smith not just a polygamist, but also polyandrous? Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4

NOW, let’s try this again:

How did it feel to learn this fact about Joseph Smith?

…

Any more of that friction I mentioned earlier?

Before we go any further, allow me to reiterate:

I am not here to convince you that Joseph Smith was a bad person.

I could go through all my cited sources and cherry-pick arguments that either deify or demonize Joseph Smith.

I could paint a portrait of a monster, or I could exonerate a prophet.

It’s not the point.

The point is to give you an emotional barometer of how you feel when presented with new ideas.

Because you may have noticed that the first fact about Joseph Smith’s polygamy was rather easy to accept.

I would even wager that when I told you the first fact, you accepted it without question.

“Oh my, how gosh-darn interesting.”

But when I told you the second fact, you immediately checked my sources and are now furiously composing an informed-yet-incendiary retort which you will boldly deliver to me in the form of a sour, blustering Facebook comment.

“FRACK YOUR WHOLE WORLDVIEW RIGHT IN THE BUM-PIPES.”

And that’s ok.

That’s all part of it.

Let’s try a few more.

…

Joseph Smith had a limp.

He was blonde, with blue or hazel eyes with thick lashes, and a prominent nose; he had small hands, large feet, and a chipped front tooth, which sometimes whistled as he spoke. Source 1.

Joseph Smith ran for president with Sidney Rigdon as vice president. Source 1

Joseph Smith planned the city of Nauvoo. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3

Joseph Smith was Lieutenant General of the Nauvoo Legion. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4

Joseph Smith was a freemason. Source 1 Source 2

Again, as you read these facts, take stock of how you feel.

I’m guessing you softened to the last few fairly easily.

Let’s try a few more, and then we’re done.

…

Joseph Smith and his friends had wine in Carthage Jail the day before he was killed. Source 1

Joseph Smith wasn’t wearing garments when he died. Source 1

Joseph Smith was convicted as a glasslooker. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4

Joseph Smith used a “… seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument..” to translate the golden plates. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4

Joseph Smith’s translation of the papyri from The Book of Abraham is actually a pagan text called “The Book of Breathings”. Source 1

Joseph Smith established the Council of Fifty, “ordained… to be the governing body of the world, with himself as chairman, Prophet, Priest, and King over the Council and the world”. Source 1. Source 2 Source 3

Joseph Smith founded a bank called the Kirtland Safety Society. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4 Source 5

Of Joseph’s wives, two were fourteen years old – Helen Mar Kimball and Nancy Winchester. An additional seven were between the ages of 16 and 19. Source 1

Joseph Smith wasn’t sealed to Emma until 1843, when he had already been sealed to over twenty other women. Source 1Source 2 Source 3

Joseph Smith “did not disclose all of his plural marriages precisely when they happened. For example, he had been sealed to Emily and Eliza Partridge already, and Emma later had one of her periods of acceptance of plural marriage, on condition that she get to choose the wives. She chose Emily and Eliza, and so they were resealed to Joseph without disclosing that they were already sealed.” Source 1

How’d those last ones feel?

Depending on your beliefs, I’m guessing it may have made some of you pretty steamed?

At the very least, you can concede that it felt different to hear those statements compared to the ones about Joseph Smith having a limp or planning a city.

Yes?

But why?

Why do we easily soften to some ideas, but not to others?

Why do we gnash our teeth when presented with evidence counter to our beliefs?

Why do we not only ignore this evidence, but dig our heels in deeper and believe more strongly in the opposing argument?

Why would providing MORE evidence make someone less likely to believe in an idea?

It seems backwards and crap-fracking-bonkers to me.

It turns out crap-fracking-bonkers has a name in the world of neuroscience.

It’s called the backfire effect.

And it’s a well-documented psychological behavior.

A few years ago at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, a study was conducted where participants were placed into an MRI machine.

Once inside, they were presented with counterarguments to strongly held political beliefs.

A few examples:

“Laws restricting gun ownership should be more restrictive.”

“Gay marriage should not be legalized.”

As participants were read these counterarguments, various parts of their brains were scanned for activity.

What the study revealed was that the same part of the brain that responds to a PHSYICAL threat responds to an INTELLECTUAL one.

This area of the brain is known as the amygdala, and it’s the emotional core of your mind.

Unfortunately, it makes us biologically wired to react to threatening information the same way we’d react to being attacked by a predator.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense.

If you were a caveman and another caveman threw a boulder at your head, you wouldn’t react by logically debating the pros and cons of getting brained.

Core beliefs are the beliefs which people cherish the most deeply.

They usually develop from childhood and are compounded by life experiences.

Core beliefs are inflexible, rigid, and incredibly sensitive to being challenged.

When I told you that Joseph Smith was the one who instituted polygamy, it probably didn’t ruffle many feathers.

But when I suggested he married women that were married to other men, I’m guessing it caused strife with some of you.

There are obvious cultural reasons for this; polygamy is a sensitive, hot-button issue.

But there are biological reasons as well: the amygdala of your brain is screaming “BATTLE STATIONS.”

“HAVE NO FEAR. I WILL KILL IT WITH SWORDS.”

Some of you may have held a worldview that Joseph Smith was a prophet and a hero. By presenting negative information about him, it challenged that worldview.

Your brain loves consistency. It builds a worldview like we build a house.

It has a foundation and a frame and windows and doors and it knows exactly how everything fits together.

If a new piece is introduced and it doesn’t fit, the whole house falls apart.

Your brain protects you by rejecting that piece.

It then builds a fence and a moat and refuses to let in any visitors.

This is why we have the backfire effect. It’s a biological way of protecting a worldview.

Just remember that your worldview isn’t a perfect house that was build to last forever.

It’s a cheap condo, and over time most of it will turn to shit.

So, what do we do about this?

Some of you have probably been nodding along in agreement, waiting for me to deliver a series of clever, combative ways to offset the backfire effect.

The disappointing truth is that I don’t have much advice for you.

I don’t have a way to change the behavior of seven-point-five billion people carrying their beliefs around like precious gems wrapped in hand grenades.

Sure, there are ways of changing people’s minds that are more effective than others, but ultimately they all fall short.

This is compounded by the internet, where anything can be cited as a source and every disagreement degrades into a room full of orangutans throwing feces at one another.

The best I can do is make you aware of it, so you can identify the backfire effect in your own brain.

Which isn’t easy. The mind can’t separate the emotional cortex from the logical one.

And one could argue that this emotional underbelly is what makes us human.

But I would argue that it’s also what makes us animals.

I sometimes pretend the amygdala of my brain is in my pinky toe.

When a core belief is challenged, I imagine it yelling insane things at me.

I let it yell.

I let it have its moment.

I let the emotional cortex fight its little fight.

And then I listen.

And then I change.

Because this universe of ours is so achingly beautiful.

And we’re all in it together.

We’re all going in the same direction.

I’m not here to take control of the wheel.

Or to tell you what to believe.

I’m just here to tell you that it’s okay to stop.

To listen.

To change.

Credit to the Oatmeal.

Personality Types

Took a test today and I’m not too surprised at the results. The description of my personality test was pretty on point. Thought I’d share with the world.

ADVOCATE PERSONALITY (INFJ, -A/-T)

The Advocate personality type is very rare, making up less than one percent of the population, but they nonetheless leave their mark on the world. As members of the Diplomat Role group, Advocates have an inborn sense of idealism and morality, but what sets them apart is that they are not idle dreamers, but people capable of taking concrete steps to realize their goals and make a lasting positive impact.

Advocates tend to see helping others as their purpose in life, but while people with this personality type can be found engaging rescue efforts and doing charity work, their real passion is to get to the heart of the issue so that people need not be rescued at all.

Help Me Help You

Advocates indeed share a unique combination of traits: though soft-spoken, they have very strong opinions and will fight tirelessly for an idea they believe in. They are decisive and strong-willed, but will rarely use that energy for personal gain – Advocates will act with creativity, imagination, conviction and sensitivity not to create advantage, but to create balance. Egalitarianism and karma are very attractive ideas to Advocates, and they tend to believe that nothing would help the world so much as using love and compassion to soften the hearts of tyrants.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Martin Luther King

Advocates find it easy to make connections with others, and have a talent for warm, sensitive language, speaking in human terms, rather than with pure logic and fact. It makes sense that their friends and colleagues will come to think of them as quiet Extraverted types, but they would all do well to remember that Advocates need time alone to decompress and recharge, and to not become too alarmed when they suddenly withdraw. Advocates take great care of other’s feelings, and they expect the favor to be returned – sometimes that means giving them the space they need for a few days.

Live to Fight Another Day

Really though, it is most important for Advocates to remember to take care of themselves. The passion of their convictions is perfectly capable of carrying them past their breaking point and if their zeal gets out of hand, they can find themselves exhausted, unhealthy and stressed. This becomes especially apparent when Advocates find themselves up against conflict and criticism – their sensitivity forces them to do everything they can to evade these seemingly personal attacks, but when the circumstances are unavoidable, they can fight back in highly irrational, unhelpful ways.

To Advocates, the world is a place full of inequity – but it doesn’t have to be. No other personality type is better suited to create a movement to right a wrong, no matter how big or small. Advocates just need to remember that while they’re busy taking care of the world, they need to take care of themselves, too.

Finding Meaning

The problem with a belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, invisible being who inhabits some place not on Earth (usually the “sky”) is that it is based on the assumption that there is a God in the first place. There is no independent evidence to support this claim of existence, only an assumption.

Remove the assumption and the claim falls apart, the belief falls apart. It is never based in fact, just feelings.

I’ve posted on this before, but it is a subject that has been on my mind lately. I grew up with this assumption repeated to me many times. Which brings me to this quote:

In other words, no matter how obviously illogical, people will accept anything that has been repeated authoritatively to them from a young age.

I stumbled into this wonderful article and couldn’t help but share some things from it that I particularly liked. Much of what is quotes is from a book by Israeli philosopher Iddo Landau titled How to Find Meaning in an Imperfect World.

” This is not a self-help book. Instead, it’s full of clear ideas on how to think about the meaning of life.

The Wrong Questions?

When a judge asks a man, “Why did you beat your wife?” there’s a problem. The judge is assuming that the man did beat his wife. The question contains an assumption.

When approaching “the meaning of life” most questions about “meaning” contain assumptions too:

“What’s the meaning of life?” Assumes that there’s a single meaning.
“Does my life have meaning?” Assumes (or at least hints) at a “yes” or “no” answer.

Neither of the above assumptions is true, says Landau. Our lives can have many meanings — in fact, they should have many meanings. And meaning in life isn’t about “yes” or “no”… It’s about enough.

To understand this, we first need to shift our thinking from “meaning” to “value”.

From Meaning to Value

Landau argues that problems of meaning are really problems of insufficient value:

“…to see life as meaningless or as insufficiently meaningful is to see it as a life with an insufficient number of aspects of sufficient value. In other words, those who take life to be meaningless feel that there is a gap between their expectations and reality: a gap between the degree of value that life should have and the degree of value that it actually does have.”

When life feels meaningless, it may mean our expectations are too high (perfectionism).

But it also might mean that we really don’t have enough value in our lives — perhaps we are overly self-conscious, live alone, have no friends, hate our job, and are drowning in both loneliness and existential fear. (I know what all of that feels like. It’s not good.)

Now here’s why this shift from meaning to value is so powerful.

First, it’s a lot easier to ask “Are there enough valuable experiences in my life?” than it is to ask, “Is my life meaningful?” The question is less vague. Also, there’s a whole field called value theory that studies how we create and discover value — a lot of work is already done for us.

But for me, the most important thing about value-thinking is that it opens two paths. To find meaning, we can either:

Add more value. We can identify activities that are (or might be) valuable to us — gardening, meditation, volunteering, etc. — and do more of them. Or, we can work in reverse, removing activities that reduce value (say, by ignoring angry reader complaints about typos).
Change our thinking. We can also change the way we see what we already have. Perhaps our life already has sources of value, but we just aren’t looking at things in the right way. (Example: I know a Japanese man who thinks his beautiful wife and daughter are “destroying his life” because, in a struggle to support them, he has no time to do other things… Yet, I know he would be devastated if they disappeared.

With this in mind, let’s refine our thinking.

Visualizing Meaning

The way most of us see meaning in life looks something like this:

 With this mental picture, we see meaning as an all or nothing, on or off, yay or nay kind of problem. This is both intimidating and un-useful.

Instead, Landau suggests we are better off seeing things as a spectrum. Imagine a number line that runs from 0 (absolutely meaningless) to 100 (absolutely meaningful).

Right now, you are somewhere along that line:

Somewhere along this line, there’s also a psychological flag:

When we have enough value in our lives to pass this psychological flag, our lives start to feel meaningful.

Why I like this model better:

It shows we already have value. Most likely, your life is not devoid of value. Rather, you probably already have some valuable things in your life. You just have to work on moving up.
It’s less scary. It’s a lot less intimidating to move up a few inches than go from meaningless to meaningful.
The goal is clear. All we need to do is (a) move our flag or (b) get closer to the flag.
It allows for fluctuations. Value doesn’t stay constant over a lifetime, or even from moment to moment. With this model, we can imagine ourselves moving up and down the line as time passes.
It (sort of) considers psychology. The flag helps us visualize how our expectations also change. This is why people with high (and mistaken) standards can feel their life is empty.“

I like the rest of this article, but won’t just copy and paste it in full. You can read the rest here.

To figure out how to add value to our life (instead of trying to find the “true meaning”), we can reflect on our past, study what has worked for others, read books, think about ethics and politics, and so on. We can also look at what we do daily and ask, “Is this really valuable to me?” If something is not valuable, maybe we should stop doing it.

Making a Board Game

Announcement!

I have finally decided to make a board game. Been working on it for a few months in fact. Honestly, It’s about time. Board games are making a huge comback as of late! Now is a better time than ever for me to finally just bite the bullet and make a game of my own.

I’ve been modifying boards games for years now. Sometimes they were just cosmetic changes, but my more ambitious projects were adding on to games ala personal expansions that built upon the core of the game, or complete re-skinning of the game into a different genre (and adding a few rules, etc.).

But I feel like all the time and energy I spent into those projects were somewhat wasted. Sure I had tons of fun while working on those projects, and I only did them in the first place because I was very passionate about those games. (and yes I learned a lot about the process and I learned how to do things better after finishing each project)  But, like I just noted, I feel like that passion could have been put to better use. In the end I was only really modifying something someone had already created. I wasn’t truly creating something original. And I feel like my friends and family never really respected my efforts. I look back and kind of agree with them. I was just taking something someone had already done and building on to it. I thought I was paying homage to it, but I sort of was just riding the coattails of their work, and it wasn’t always accepted by those in my social circles.

So why not just make a brand new board game? So that’s what I decided to do.

I finished all preliminary steps in the game creation process recently. I have a document that will be acting as the rulebook, and I made some ad-hoc designs (all black and white) for playtesting. The actual game will be much more detailed and colorful, but I didn’t want to waste too much  It is so far in the VERY alpha stage. I won’t be posting too much about it here since I haven’t trademarked anything yet but the game is in a space age sci-fi setting and the point of the game is to choose a planet and colonize it. I had a few names for the game but most were already taken. Space Colony was one I wanted, but someone made that game already back in 1977.

There are, of course, games that have influenced me in the creation of my game. For example, I enjoy the trading element in Catan, and the dice rolling in combat from Risk and other games.

But this game is of my own creation, and I am proud to say that out loud! Just as I was proud to finally have a published book in my name. (still working on the sequel)

I plan to take my game to Kickstarter when it gets closer (after some heavy playtesting and game balance tightening) for funding. I also plan on taking my game to Rad Con in 2019, assuming I’m still in the Tri-Cities at that time.

 

 

March for Change

I was going to write up this whole blog post about the Protect LDS Children movement, but someone at the Washington Post already did it, and better than I probably could’ve covered it, so I’ll just echo their thoughts here, YES STOP THE INTERVIEWS WITH YOUTH! and I’ll include their text below:

>>> SALT LAKE CITY — About 1,000 current and former Mormons marched to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City Friday to deliver petitions demanding an end to closed door, one-on-one interviews between youth and lay leaders where sexual questions sometimes arise. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changed its policy this week to now allow children to bring a parent or adult with them to the interviews, but protesters said that doesn’t go far enough to keep children safe. The policy change followed recent revelations that a former prominent missionary leader was accused of sexually assaulting two women in the 1980s. The ex-leader denies the allegations.

Protesters carried signs such as “Mormon children we have your back” and “No more closed doors,” saying the so-called “worthiness” meetings can lead to unhealthy shaming of youth. Some cried as they recalled being asked detailed questions about their sexual activity or being punished after admitting to masturbation.

“This is my church and it has many good things but it has one thing that has to be eliminated,” said campaign organizer Sam Young, a Mormon from Houston, urging an end to one-on-one interviews and all sexually explicit questions.

Church officials say the interviews allow bishops to get to know youth better and determine their religious habits and obedience to God. They usually happen twice a year starting at age 12. Questions cover topics such as school, sports, hobbies, education goals and family issues, but sometimes delve into sexual behavior because of the church’s strict teachings on abstinence before marriage.

The protesters said they delivered 55,000 signatures on petitions and 15 copies of a book with people’s stories of inappropriate encounters during the interviews to a church representative from the public relations office.

The event came a day before a twice-annual church conference that will be the first since new church president Russell M. Nelson assumed the post in January.

The march had been planned for months by Young, who launched the public campaign last year after he said private attempts to get church leaders’ attention failed.

Allan Mount, a 36-year-old Mormon father of four from Murray, Utah, said he’s a loyal member of the religion who plans to teach his kids the importance of chastity. But, he said the line of questioning that too often happens in the meetings isn’t necessary.

“There’s too much shame attached it,” said Mount. “You can have a healthy understanding of how you should responsibly act sexually without there being shame involved.”

Robin Day, 40, traveled to the march from Arkansas. At one point, he broke down in tears as he relived not being allowed to pray in church or visit the temple when he admitted to his bishop as a teen that he masturbated. He eventually left the church.

“I was told I was lying to God if I don’t confess,” Day said.

Mormon spokeswoman Irene Caso said in a statement Friday that the religion “condemns any inappropriate behavior or abuse regardless of where or when it occurs” and that church leaders are given instructions for youth interviews.

The statement also seemed to be open to change: “As with any practice in the Church, we continually look for ways to improve and adjust by following the Savior in meeting the needs of our members.”

Scott Gordon, president of FairMormon, a volunteer organization that supports the church, said he agrees that bishops shouldn’t be asking inappropriate sexual questions but disagrees with Young’s demand to require that parents be in every interviews and a ban on questions about a teen’s sexual activities.

“What they’re asking is a step too far,” Gordon said. “It’s making the assumption that bishops are sexual predators. They’re not.”<<<

Source

A Whole New World

So… I wear glasses now.

The doctor told me I should’ve gotten them years ago and that I have been over-focusing all this time to compensate. I find this ironic and funny, because in school on those little tests they did I was always told that I had 20/20 vision. Yup. Over-focusing. The doctor said that is common because in school there is a lot of peer pressure and you want to perform well so usually they only catch kids with really bad blurry vision. The rest focus harder to “pass” the test or just don’t need glasses.

Looking back there were plenty of things that really should’ve clued me in. I’m a millennial so I grew up in the time when theaters were just transitioning from film to digital. I thought the “fuzziness” that I saw when going to the cinemas just went along with the grainy black flecks of film that were a part of “movies on the big screen”. Then, when the theaters in my area transitioned to all digital projection screens I thought movie makers just carried that “fuzziness” quality over to stay authentic. People always talked about the “crisp, clear images”, but it never clicked in my head that whatever was wrong was something wrong WITH MY OWN EYES.

I also thought the halo effect around lights, especially far away or at night, was just part of how light far away or at night functioned. Oh boy… The world is SO MUCH CLEARER now. I can’t believe I have been suffering with a fuzzy world for so long, and getting headaches from straining my eyes.

It’s like looking at a whole new world. Thank science for technology!

At least, technically speaking, I can claim that I am a cyborg now, right? (utilizing technology to enhance my physiological performance)