I haven’t had a hearing test in years, not because I didn’t want one, or didn’t try, but because the last time I went and got a referral, it kept being misfiled, therefore they were unable to set up the appointment before the referral expired. I just haven’t gotten around to trying again since then. But it’s been way too long (around seven years since my last appointment, and around ten years since my last appointment that I consider to have actually given accurate results for my baseline; my ears did something weird during both of the tests after the one ten years ago, and so while I consider those results accurate for the day they were taken, I don’t consider them accurate for my hearing baseline) and I have definitely lost more hearing in my left ear at least, possibly (probably) the right, too.

It would be really nice to actually know where my hearing is at...I just hate the idea of going through the referral process all over again and then not having it processed properly *again*. Is it permitted to set up an appointment without one? Does it depend on the office?

More hearing loss related posts I’ve come up with over the years :)

As always, these are things which may apply to anyone with hearing loss, my point is that they do apply to mild hearing losses, too, and recognizing this can help with the mild hearing loss impostor syndrome :P

1-That moment when you have absolutely no idea what’s going on because the room has terrible acoustics.

P.E. class. Pep rallies. Indoor recess. Some awards ceremonies. Basically anything involving a noisy, echoing gymnasium.

2-Managing to catch enough of a conversation to understand the basics of what it’s about, but not catching enough to be able to contribute without worrying about saying something off-topic.

3-Watching a youtube commercial and being confused about why the ad is singing “sabotage, sabotage sabo-sabo-sabotage” only to realize they are actually singing “summertime” and I’m just hearing it wrong.

4-When someone’s talking to you, and you hear them and realize they’re addressing you, but they didn’t catch your attention first so you weren’t focusing on it well enough to properly comprehend what they’ve been saying. So you turn to them and ask if they’re talking to you, just to clarify so you can ask them to repeat themselves if needed, and get a Look Of Befuddlement like, “You’re not even that far away, can’t you hear me?” lol

To be fair, I’m not sure how much she knew about my hearing loss, and she was only a few feet away and slightly stressed because we were in the middle of setting up for a fundraiser and she was trying to give me instructions... but I was already focused on something else when she started talking to me and I needed to give her my full attention in order to comprehend said instructions. :P

(she didn’t say anything about it, I just could tell that she found it strange that I wasn’t even sure whether she was talking to me or not)

5-Person: “what’s that sound?”

Me: “....”

My Brain: *what sound?*

My Joker Side, hours later: *You totally should’ve said it was aliens*

Mild hearing loss problems, round 2!

Most of these happen to everyone with hearing loss, but I feel like it should be acknowledged that they do, in fact, happen to people with mild hearing loss too. So many people with mild hearing loss experience hard-of-hearing imposter syndrome; as someone with a mild hearing loss, writing these sorts of posts was a major part of coming to terms with the fact that I really did qualify as a hard of hearing person; I can say that I am hard of hearing with full confidence now, but at the time I was writing these, I was writing them as much for myself as for other people. :P

-That moment when the person across from you says a bunch of gibberish so you turn to your relative standing behind you and ask, “What’d he say?”

-Being the last person in your family to know about anything that’s happening because your relatives assume you heard them discussing the thing while you were in the room.

-Hearing somebody just fine one moment, but having that one second of not hearing them, so that you think they didn’t respond to you, when they actually did-- and yet you’ve heard them just fine the rest of the time.

-When you ask someone to repeat themselves, but instead of actually repeating what they said or at least rephrasing it, they either get slightly defensive or start trying to expound on what they said... but the problem was that you didn’t understand what they said in the first place, so their clarification/explanation doesn’t help at all because you don’t have the background sentence to go on.

-When you know you didn’t understand what somebody said, but you just... don’t really want to bother with asking them to repeat themselves at that particular moment, so you let it go.

The one less talked about (relatability-speaking)

Every time I look up hearing loss/hoh stuff, I have always seen lots of information for and life experiences of people who have moderate or severe hearing losses, or hearing loss in general, or are totally deaf. However, every time I search for things regarding “mild hearing loss” specifically, I end up seeing the same stuff over and over and over... and over again. Even if it’s not the same webpage, it’s the exact same material rehashed, and it’s usually on a medical website.

So, over the years, I have tried making posts on some of my socials, in the same theme as “hard of hearing problems“ or “theatre kid problems“ and so on, using my experiences as someone with a mild hearing loss. I think those with milder hearing losses need more stories of their own, more “things only ppl with X will understand” lists, more exposure in general. And that is why I have shared my own stories, in the hopes that others with mild hearing loss can see them too and relate.

Sadly, not very many people have actually read the posts. Which is…fine. It doesn’t stop me from making them, I don’t care about the popularity factor, but the whole point in making the things was so other people with mild hearing loss would have something to relate to. So I figured I’d share a few of them here, just for fun. So without further ado...

Mild Hearing Loss Problems:

-When you’re not actually sure if the problem you’re having at the moment is something everyone has trouble with, or if it’s caused by your hearing issues

-When you’re wearing headphones and someone comes in the room and tries to talk to you, but the headphones turn your mild hearing loss into a moderate hearing loss and you can’t understand a thing, so you have to take them off and make the person repeat themselves

-Wanting to reblog one of those “reblog if you’re hard of hearing!” posts but not being sure you’re “hard of hearing enough” even though the first three points on your audiogram are at 40 dB (my HL is reverse slope)

-Travelling with other people and they’re playing music, but it’s juuust quiet enough that you can’t hear it well enough to truly enjoy it... yet still loud enough that you’re not sure if you ought to ask them to turn it up. Because while your volume preferences aren’t uncomfortably loud, they’re still significantly louder than the majority of the people you’re riding with.

-That moment when you find yourself thinking “Ah, my hearing’s not that bad, I don’t need captions...” and then you watch a video with the niblings--without captions-- and find yourself having trouble hearing a lot of the dialogue. Then later you watch a video with the family, with captions, and realize that without the captions you wouldn’t have caught a large portion of what was said...and come to the reluctant conclusion that yes, you do need captions. To some extent. Fiiiiine.

That’s all the ones I’m going to post for now; I may post some more of these another time but I don’t want to overwhelm the post with a million of them at once. :P

Why do so many people post pictures of their eardrums in this subreddit? I feel like every time I come here there’s some post or other that’s just a picture of the inside of someone’s ear, and it’s just. Jarring every time. I mean I *kinda* get it in the case of someone who has medical questions about something, but there’s times where people just. Upload eardrum pictures???

Sometimes they happen to include a title of a particular condition. And that’s the extent of it. Just. Why??? It feels like the equivalent of if you went to a glasses subreddit and every twenty posts or so somebody posted a picture of the back of their retinas. Which, as far as I’m concerned, would be a strange thing to do.

I’m hard of hearing myself, and even before I got into fictional/made-up languages, it’s always been an interesting thought to me, the idea that perhaps different languages may be easier (or harder) for a hard of hearing person to understand, and it makes me curious whether developing a conlang for testing such a thing would actually work.

Now, you’d have to come up with about four or five separate langs, because there’s multiple types and degrees of hearing loss, but if nothing else, it could be a fun challenge—pick an audiogram, check out the speech banana, use only (or at least primarily) the sounds that someone with that type of audiogram would be able to hear…

I already have two langs going right now, but I’m almost tempted to try it. What do you guys think? Would you ever consider doing this? Would it be an interesting way to randomize your phonetic choices, or do you think it would be too limiting?

So, due to the way my conlang works, I’ve decided that I basically need to come up with a type of limited taxonomy when it comes to creating nouns. (Yes, this is proving to be an extremely difficult project, but that’s alright lol)

I’m starting with plants and animals, but I don’t want to use the existing animal classification system as-is, because this is still meant to be general purpose (not in the sense that I expect it to be easy to use or learn for humans since it’s supposed to be an alien language, but rather in the sense that its vocabulary consists of the sort of things you would expect to find in everyday life, and the descriptions for objects and animals will reflect this; the categories that the words in this language use to describe things isn’t necessarily going to line up with the categories used in the scientific classification for them, because it’s not meant to be used in that way)

I’m *not* trying to fully reinvent scientific terminology with this language, I just want to make it so each thing is briefly described well enough that the person reading it can work out what’s being referred to. So I need to decide which characteristics are going to apply, because things like “gives birth to live young” and “wood composed of tracheids” aren’t exactly going to apply here LOL (yes, I’ve been doing research)

Primarily, I’m trying to use categories that relate to things that are directly observable, which can be used to create a mental image of the animal and let you identify it. Things like shape, color, texture, sound, size, and so on.

I’m currently trying to decide on the categories for describing animals. So far I have:

-is an animal

-lives or is most active in X environment (land, sky, water)

-I’m considering letting the third one be *similar* to “vertebrate vs invertebrate“ but with slightly different concepts included- these concepts include “squishy; hard on the outside; hard on the inside; hard on the outside and the inside” (worms/jellyfish/octopi, creatures with a carapace or exoskeleton, creatures with an internal skeleton, creatures with both a carapace and a skeleton)

I might end up just going with “vertebrate” and “invertebrate” if I can’t figure out how to denote multiple features with one category, but like I said, I’m trying to take inspiration from taxonomy without copying it directly :P

I *do* want to use “carnivore/herbivore/omnivore” I just haven’t decided where to put it in the lineup. I’ve also considered “predator/not predator,” “furry/not furry,” “manylegged/somelegged/nolegged,” “spiky/hard/soft/rough/smooth” (for skin texture, etc), and “tiny/small/large-small/small-large/large/huge”

Anyway, I’m looking for descriptive category suggestions (and possibly ways I could simplify this so that I don’t require ten different adjectives for every single animal), because everything I just listed is enough to distinguish an octopus vs a fish vs a lizard vs a bird vs a furry animal, but trying to differentiate between “predatory animals with fur” (bear, dog, lion, housecat) or “different kinds of reptiles” (even basic things like lizard vs alligator vs frog, I’m not necessarily trying to go for “komodo dragon“ here or anything) is proving difficult.

The conlang I’m working on is extremely meaning-dependent. The words themselves are created from a set of base meanings that are smushed together into a single idea. (Some similarity to toki pona in that regard, yet also really really not).

I asked someone for advice on how I should go about choosing which core/base meanings were most important (the way I’m putting this together requires a limited set of what I’m calling “cores” to work from; I currently only have 25 cores in use, possibly 26 but I haven’t fully decided how I’m using that one yet) and someone suggested I look into semantic primes.

(All this is to explain why I’m asking this question in the first place, because if I was making a normal conlang, then it wouldn’t really matter one way or the other since I could just *poof* come up with something)

So, the thing that’s confusing me is this: in the list of semantic primes, there are two words that confuse me because they have multiple possible definitions in the context of the list.

The first word that’s confusing me is Body. This is in the “Relational substantives” category, which makes me think it’s referring to “form,” because that would go along with “part“ and “kind/type.” If that is the case, then it probably means “body” as in “the overall form and shape of the space an object takes up.” But it could also be specifically referring to a person’s body, for all I know, so I want to be sure about which it is before I go cementing it into the foundation of my language.

The second word (and the one that’s REALLY confusing me) is “Way.” This one wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the category it’s placed into within the list. For some reason, “Way” is categorized as a “Similarity“ word, alongside “Like” and “As.” This is extremely odd to me and I’m not sure which version of the word they’re talking about here, or in what context they’re using it.

I’ve been working further on my colors conlang, and I would appreciate feedback on what I currently have in place.

For those who haven’t seen my first post, this is a concept-based language using color as the primary medium, with the origin of the idea being the concept of a language spoken by aliens via color changes in the skin. The general idea is that each color has a few related core meanings, which combine together to create a new meaning.

The order of the colors does matter. For instance: 

-“I/me” is conveyed with this combination of base concepts: “self/unit” and “has/is full of/is in possession of” meaning “the self that is owned” [that the self is owned by the speaker is implied]

-“a/one” is conveyed with the same two colors, used in reverse: “to be full of/to possess” combines with “self/unit” to mean “to be full of selfness/to exist as a unit”

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I explained how the language is meant to work in more detail a few days ago in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1uvs1dr/looking_for_advice_on_some_of_the_linguistic/

The gist of it is, each combination of two colors is meant to define a core “idea” which can then be added onto to further develop specific words. My current project involves developing the meanings of each of these pairs of colors, to serve as the base concepts and modifiers that everything else will be built on. That means that I have to take care to be simultaneously specific and generic in my choices for the meanings of each color individually.

I have 28 colors in use, 25 of which have been assigned a meaning. Because this is a language based in conceptualization, I’m starting out by trying to reach a point where the language can express all of the semantic primes (or at least get to the point where I can formulate a sentence that contains each concept, I know it doesn’t necessarily have to be individual words), with the next goal being to move to the Swadesh 207 list and a “core concepts” list I discovered while searching for advice. This won’t be the end-all-be-all of the language but I want to establish a solid core/foundation to work from.

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I do think what I currently have *could* work as-is if I were to stretch a few meanings, but I don’t want to be “stretching” meanings at the beginning of the process while I’m still forming the basic roots of the language. Similarly, while I have a way to convey various ideas, a lot of the resulting words end up larger than I would prefer for something so basic, while other ideas are extremely simple to convey despite not being the type of word that I necessarily need in my “collection of root ideas.”

For instance, “inertia” can be conveyed with two colors, but “cause” requires five. “See” requires four colors, and “consciousness” requires two, etc. I have a word for “communicate” which I do actually like despite its complexity, but using the same word for “say” would be ridiculous considering how long it is; imagine having to write out, “Sally articulated” every time you needed to say she “said” something! It’s technically workable, but difficult, and I want to see if I can streamline it a bit and/or make it a little more intuitive. So, I’m considering my base-meanings, and how I can possibly change them to accommodate my goals for the language. I think some of my cores are too specific and others carry too many meanings at once, but I’m trying to identify which ones actually need changing.

There are several color-meanings which are essential that I don’t want to change too much (like Brown), but there’s a few that I haven’t managed to use for more than one or two words in total (like Pastel Orange), which makes me think that something is wrong with the meaning that I chose for that particular color. There’s also some colors that exist somewhere in the middle, which I think are fairly acceptable as they are, but could have their meanings tweaked a bit so as to make them less restrictive (like Pink and Blue)

With this in mind, I would appreciate feedback on whether any of these choices for assigned meanings seem particularly unhelpful or redundant, and whether there’s anything specific that I’m missing.

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Warning in advance: this next section is going to be very long.

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Current List of Color Meanings:

-Red: Force/Violence/Negation/No/Agitation/Ferocity

(Originally included “sharpness” but I don’t think that works well with the other parts of the definition)

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-Orange: Activity/Motion/Direction

(Originally included “rough”)

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-Yellow: Energy/Skill/Capability/Knowledge

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-Green: Happiness/Life/Growth/Yes/Natural Increase

(Could possibly mean “good” but I’m undecided on that; I feel like including “good” in the core meaning makes the overall core too ambiguous)

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-Blue: Contentment/Calm/Stillness/Smooth/Gentleness

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-Purple: Deterioration/Smallness/Diminish/Shrink/Sadness

(Originally included “stagnation” but this has been reassigned to Blue-Purple)

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-Brown: Steadiness/Physicality/Solid/Firm/Continuing

(used as the core for physical things like plants, animals, landscapes, elements…)

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-Gray: Confusion/Uncertainty/Intangibility

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-Black: Space/Nothingness/Spatial Concepts

(Technically includes“ending/stop” in its set of meanings, but I haven’t ever actually managed to use that, and it actually contradicts with white, so I might drop it)

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-Dark Gray: Emptiness/Lack/Loss

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-Beige or Tan: Fullness/Ownership

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-White: All/Everything/Completion/Beginning

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-Aquamarine (or any color that is somewhere fully in between blue and green): Understanding/Connection

(Originally included “encouragement” but I haven’t found a use for it)

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-Pale/Pastel Orange:

Strength/Will

(I haven’t found this color particularly useful because any meaning I can use it for ends up being either too redundant or too vague. I had an idea to potentially use this color as a core for internal actions like “choose/consider/understand, etc, as opposed to Orange referring to external actions, but I’m having trouble properly conceptualizing this when combined with the other colors in the list, so I’m not sure what to do about that)

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-(Pale) Pink: Greater/Additional/At a higher level

(This one works decently well, but I need some way to differentiate between enlarging something vs adding onto it vs one thing simply being larger than another)

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-Lavender/Pale Purple: Piece/Section/Part/Remove/Take/Some

(This is occasionally annoying to work with because it’s hard to define whether you’re “removing something” or just “dividing it into sections”)

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-Dark Purple: Break/Broken/Damage(d)/Separate

(This color definitely needs to be reworked. I could see “damage” being used as a part of its meaning in conjunction with other words, but by itself, it ends up being too limited in how it combines with other things, and I end up not even bothering to write them down because they’re all just variations of the same idea)

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-Magenta: Passion/Intensity/Purification

(“Purify” was added recently, because I was finding “passion” difficult to use. However, I do think that passion and intensity needs to remain an element of this meaning)

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-Dark Red-Pink:

Consume/eat/engulf

(I feel like concept of consumption is absolutely needed within the base meanings, but I keep having issues with multiple words coming out to mean “acid” or something similar, I may need to modify it slightly so that it’s more closely related to food)

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-Blue-Gray: Liquid (adj; state of being; refers to fluidity)

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-Blue-Purple: Stagnant, Slow, Thick

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-Pastel Green (or pale grey-green): Essence/Spirit/Spiritual

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-Yellow-Green: Self/Unit 

(The meanings of the various colors that mix together to create this color combine to roughly mean, “the essence of something’s spirit, life, growth, ability, or knowledge”)

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-Olive Green: Animal, or relating to animals

(This is a linguistic shortcut derived from the combination of concepts required for the word “animal.”  A combination of brown and green, meaning “living organism,” it could technically be feasibly used to refer to plants as well; however, it is generally understood to be animal-specific, and using it for plants will get you weird looks and confused conversation partners.)

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-Gold: Used For Words Defining Physical Characteristics Of An Object

(Particularly in the case of physical descriptors used for plants, animals, and materials, though furniture and such can be involved too. For instance, if you need to define an object’s texture, appearance, level of firmness, malleability, fragility, etc. Could probably also be used for flavors)

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-Silver, Pale Blue, and Auburn are currently unassigned to a specific meaning, although I have a couple ideas.

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I‘ve managed to intuit a lot of meaning from these so far. I currently have a list of a couple hundred “root concepts” (as I’m calling them). However, most of them are emotions, random adjectives, movements, and words relating to science or mathematics. Of the 67 semantic primes, I have roughly half of them in my current lexicon, out of around…probably around 225 words at this point (I counted 173-ish the other day, but I’ve added onto it since)

Of the 34 semantic primes that I do *not* have, most of them are:

-the determiners (this, the same, other)

-evaluators (good/bad)

-time derivatives (I have past/present/future, but not before, after, or time duration)

-specific spatial concepts (I have something that *could* equate to “above” and “below,” but I’m not sold on those and I think they’re too complicated)

-logical concepts (can, because, if, cause)

-similarity (sameness, like, as, way).

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I’m also having trouble defining specific numerical values; I have some ideas for how to use the numbers to create bigger ones, but I don’t have those starting numbers to work with, except for “zero” and “one” (which is a recent addition and not yet solidified)

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I would appreciate constructive feedback if possible. I know it’s a lot of detail to parse through. I’ve been enjoying the process of developing this, but I’ve never done this before so the entire process is new to me lol!

Just generally curious; what kind of rock do we think makes up Brittle Hollow? (Assuming that there is a real world comparison in the first place) I was thinking it looks kind of like some kind of crystal, but that’s primarily on the inside. The outside looks dark like obsidian (though my nephew pointed out that it’s the wrong color)

Is the rock volcanic in nature? Was it melted and reshaped by millennia of lava meteors? (I actually had a thought that maybe at the beginning of their existence, Hollows Lantern was the larger of the two, and the volcanic eruptions solidified and formed Brittle Hollow itself. That’s probably a silly theory though lol)

So I’ve come to the realization that the travelers’ instruments correspond to their respective planets. Gabbro has a flute, which requires air to play and is shaped similarly to a cyclone. Riebeck has a banjo, which is round and hollow. Feldspar has a harmonica, which is multifaceted and plays several sounds at once. Esker is a bit of a stretch, but whistling is what you use when you have nothing else to play, and the moon doesn’t exactly have much on it. If nothing else, whistling also tends to be something you do when you’re chilling by yourself, and it could be a simple reminder of home. Still a little bit of a weak correlation, but it works.

But the choice of instrument for Chert is kind of strange to me. How do the Hourglass Twins relate to drums? Based on the formation of the planet they reside on, I would have given them something like an ocarina (because it has several holes), cymbals (still a drum, but closer to the actual shape of Ember Twin), or some kind of instrument that uses a crank (because of the way the two planets orbit each other, connected by sand). Now granted, I can’t think of any instruments that use a crank (which aren’t self-playing, anyway), but I’m sure there’s some that exist!

The best I can figure is that the relation has something to do with the Hourglass Twins acting as a sort of timepiece, and the drum representing rhythm as Chert keeps time. But that feels like I’m reaching, and I didn’t have to reach so hard to understand the choices for everyone else.

Thoughts?

It’s nowhere near complete yet, only just started it this afternoon, but I’ve seen a few other ciphers on the subreddit and while all of them are cool, none of them really felt intuitive to me. (not saying they’re “done wrong“ or that they wouldn’t feel intuitive to someone else, just not me :P) plus the one that REALLY looks like Nomai writing is apparently in Latin for some reason? Or something? And I want a basic system that I can use to just write, y’know?

So I figured it might be fun to make my own and see what I end up with. I don’t know if the final product will end up easier or harder than what others have come up with LOL but I guess we’ll see.

The main things I’ve come up with so far are these:

A: In looking at the way the various shapes are formatted and clustered together, I noticed a few common patterns which I turned into a few rudimentary grammar rules.

1. Those weird loop-line things you see every so often arcing over a small bit of text are used to signify the end of one sentence and the beginning of another.

2. Similarly, those random lines between clusters of polygons and whatnot are what I’m using as spaces between words.

3. Those cases where there seems to be a divide between two separate sets of words is the equivalent of a semicolon, or like a comma when used to divide two separate phrases, without actually dividing the phrases into separate sentences. (So for instance, you would use this with a sentence such as “The dog wanted to go outside, but he couldn’t because it was raining.“ or “The apples are nearly ripe; soon it will be time for the harvest.”)

4. The little things sticking out of various letters are primarily made up of vowels. I have hopes of being able to use the position of the vowel on a consonant (which are primarily made up of polygons) to indicate whether a vo comes before or after that consonant (for cases where the vowel comes at the beginning of the word) but for the time being that’s being indicated differently because I h managed to make that aspect work in a way that’s practical.

B. The majority of the letters are made up of variations on a square, a pentagon, and a…um…hexagon? Six-sided.

The way each of these shapes works is, the plain version of the shape is the unvoiced, unsustained form of a particular sound (i.e. T, K, P). The voiced version (D, G, B) of the shape is indicated by its having bumps on all the corners, and the voiced/sustained version (N, Ng, M) is an open shape/has one side missing. Any letter that is voiced (except W, Y, and R) will have bumps on its corners.

Sounds such as Sh, Zh, and both versions of Th are created by tabbing the H symbol onto the side of the appropriate consonant (S, Z, T, and D)

W is a version of the letter P with two sides squished inward. R is a version of W in which one side is left not fully closed. Y uses the same principle as is used for W, except applied to the symbol for T. X is a combination of the S and K symbols.

And that’s about what I’ve got at the moment. I still haven’t figured out F and V. Or a few of the more specific vowel sounds.

So we know that the >!owlkins and the Stranger!< ended up >!cutting off the signal from the Eye of the Universe!< and that caused the signal to >!cut off at the last second when the Nomai were warping!<

And then they crashed into Dark Bramble.

So I was thinking about why that might have happened, and I had a thought:

What if >!the last bits of!< the signal went inside Dark Bramble, bounced around for awhile, and then came out just in time for the Vessel to catch it? That could be why they ended up warping to the wrong location in the first place—it never really made sense to me before that Dark Bramble was able to just distort the coordinates themselves or something, but I couldn’t think of any other explanation. But I did just think of this, and I think it makes as much sense as anything else

Was mentioning this to my nephew last night—one thing I find hilarious about the Nomai is how they don’t actually…*fly* anywhere. They use warp drives to travel between star systems. They use their shuttles by way of precalculated mathematical trajectory. They use gravity elevators to go between locations on Brittle Hollow (for understandable reasons, but it’s still funny that their idea of a safe, direct path was floating over the black hole).

Everything is so strangely…*rigid* when it comes to all of their travel methods. No margin of error, no room for correction. Nothing that can be changed “in the moment” aside from the capability to warp back home in emergencies…

Like sure, there’s the escape pods, but even those are *also* only used in the event of an emergency, and still don’t seem to have any active controls involved. It’s weird.

I was thinking about the question that has been asked a few times regarding how, if the various quantum objects such as the quantum rocks and moon and the things surrounding them and so forth move when you stop observing them, then why doesn’t the Eye of the Universe do the same thing?

Here’s my hypothesis: the way quantum mechanics works when it comes to normal objects, both in the real world and in Outer Wilds, they exist everywhere until observed—this applies to ALL objects, not just so-called “quantum“ objects; in truth, calling any particular object quantum is silly because everything that has ever existed is *already* quantum.

And yet, normal objects don’t move, but quantum objects do. But the Eye of the Universe is the penultimate quantum object, and it *doesn’t* move, yet their interactions with the Eye are the very reason why quantum objects act the way they do.

I think the reason for this is a lot simpler than one might think: the Eye is quantum in the sense that it is the point where all possibilities meet and exist at the same time. But those possibilities relate to everything around (and through) it, not to the Eye itself. What it *does* do is allow whatever comes into contact with it to temporarily access those other possibilities and bring them into being within the physical world. Whereas non-quantum objects resolve to the same position each time they’re observed because despite everything, the possibility that the observer already knows about is the one they’re stuck with, the quantum objects which have interacted with the Eye are no longer bound to a single possibility. They have the capacity to switch around between them.

I’m no physicist, so this is all entirely speculative, but this is just a random theory for a video game anyway, so. :P

Thoughts?

This is a poem about how it feels when my mom asks me what I’ve been doing after a period of daydreaming. Figured I might as well share it. :P

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What were you doing all day? She asks

Asks me as if I could ever explain

Would she believe me, if I should complain?

Complain, though I still have the skill to do tasks.

Can an addiction be mental?

It can.

But most would say this is just discipline’s lack.

All of the times that I’ve driven it back,

Revoked when my fears wash resolve down the drain.

How can I tell you my thoughts,

My dreams,

When dreams are the sickness that led me to here?

And once you have taken me out of the sphere

Of fantasy, who will you find in the seams?

What was I doing?

What can I say?

The truth is, I spent all my time in my head

But speaking that out sounds insane, so instead

I make up an excuse and go on with my day.