no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out - we’re such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where you’re hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.
I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall, and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not - I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!
I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input
Feel like we’ve unlocked a new level of ‘Humans Like To Poison Themselves For Fun’ here.
What with: “The human brain will begin to malfunction if placed in total darkness, to the point that Sensory Deprivation is considered a form of torture.”
Being followed immediately by: “So sometimes I like to do that to myself deliberately, because I like the pictures it makes.”
Somehow spelunkers have managed to invent Psychological Chilli.
It’s kinda funny that the Spider-Verse movies are such bangers when the actual Spider-Verse arc in the comics was like. kind of shit. Like it introduced Spider-Gwen and I’ll always love it for that but the actual arc itself was nothing to write home about
Like the actual plot of Spider-Verse in the comics is that there’s like an ancient immortal space vampire who eats spider-people so all the spider-people across dimensions have to team up to stop him but only the Real 616 Peter Parker can Truly save the day because he’s the Most Special. Miles is like, a bit-player in this. It’s mostly just a bombastic nonsense excuse to show different variants of Spider-Man getting murked.
The movie adapts way more from Miles’ Ultimate Spider-Man origin as well as the Spider-Men book
Was that the same event that erased the Ultimate Universe and transferred Miles to 616 or was that something else?
Nah that was Secret Wars, that was a lot later.
comic book fans could make up literally anything and claim it happened in a run and like 90% of the audience would have no choice to take their word. Y'all should use this power less responsibly
There’s a parallel version of Spider-Man who’s a car and his name is Peter Parkedcar
@demilypyro You think you’re being funny, but that is not more psychotic than Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, which is canon, and strongly supports alys’ argument.
i literally have no fucking idea who any of you people are without them and i cannot fucking fathom who tumblr staff thinks this change would appeal to
u know that thing where an animals grow in a far off place and some idiot introduces him to a new habitat and it turns out its characteristics that help them in their own sometimes are too helpful in the new one and they become like an invasive species yeah thats the word i was missing anyway back to my point i think i saw a human version of that just now i was driving in tonights snow storm and i saw a man wearing a big ass cowboy hat to keep the snow off him and a bandit red bandana to keep it off his face and a big ass pancho to keep him warm and nice ass cowboy boots to keep his calves dry and he was prancing along while everyone on the road looked miserable and frozen solid and idk i guess the point im trying to make here is i feel like cowboys would have taken over russia if given the chance or something
As an Evolutionary Biologist, this is a roller-coaster from start to finish.
Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?
Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.
Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.
Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?
ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose
Another one that I just found recently is this, which is a whole collection of blogs, organized by topic!
This website is at contsant war witht the staff where the staff release a change that is universally ill-recieved by everyone, and then people start releasing user scripts that specifically reverse whatever staff did. And then we all go complain to them in their feedback box, which they apparently don’t read. the bastards.
Also quick aside the people running this place aren’t your friends stop giving them money until they fix every issue here and also revert every shitty change they have done in the past 6 months.
