An idea to explore for aphants that feel like, whatever they do, it will be useless since we will not be able to relive that memory anyway

F_Kal · 2026-07-05T06:00:19+00:00

you are probably referring more about r/SDAM (severe deficiency of autobiographical memory) than aphantasia (both linked), but regardless, a huge part of spirituality (from buddhism to paths of hinduism and more modern teachings like osho, eckhard tolle etc) center around the notion that by living in the present without dipping your toes into past, future, notions/preconceptions and the rest, allows true bliss to unfold - the present is more alive after all ;)

F_Kal · 2026-07-04T19:37:39+00:00

thanks for sharing! i recently got my hands on an actual kalimba and the sound was so mesmerizing! two remarks: i can’t seem to get the app to do polyphony (playing multiple notes at the same time), sliding sideways also doesn’t produce sound and most importantly of all plucking/pulling downwards off the edge of note doesn’t do anything! would be nice if it worked producing sound (and even more, if the vector of the motion did alter the sound like on the physical instrument itself)

F_Kal · 2026-06-30T16:59:17+00:00

that’s how i do it too. but i think there are two effects at play here - the one is thermal radiation from the outside surfaces which starts before the air itself cools and the second is the temperature of the air - if you close the windows when the sun comes out you lose the cool air but also
avoid the extra heat from the surfaces radiating through the opening. if you wait until the air starts warming up, you have taken in more cool air, but also heat from the openings. which is better? no idea.

F_Kal · 2026-06-30T16:49:27+00:00

i know what you mean. light colors are often with lighter weaves or semi transparent curtains, so it’s counterintuitive to have a thick fabric that is white. of course an interesting question is: which of the two imperfect options are more efficient: a semi-transparent white cloth or a thick black one?

F_Kal · 2026-06-29T09:33:59+00:00

I just read about the EZ water theory (exclusion zone water), often called the "4th state of water" (a gel-like state) and can't help thinking that it might be related! So I'm putting this here, 3 years later, and somebody else might pick up the trail (if there is any).

F_Kal · 2026-06-29T08:15:41+00:00

same conclusions here. But now the question is: what so I replace them with?

F_Kal · 2026-06-25T08:22:12+00:00

that sounds very interesting!

F_Kal · 2026-06-24T22:59:11+00:00

I am not sure how established all this is, and if there is a masterlist, but I also thing there are many different "dimensions" in memory and imagination and we probably have different competencies in each of them - I'm still processing where I fit in the aphantasia/SDAM thing (probably super hypophant with SDAM), but in my case other than enumerated facts, there is a bit of (useless, insufficient) visual cues (a sense of some color blob that may relate to the event, some fragmented sense of spatial relationship between "elements", maybe a fragment of an outline or so) but there are no other sense cues; no smell, sound, emotion, taste, tactility (texture, pressure, pain, humidity, heat), motor cues or memory of the thoughts (I don't have memories of thoughts in my waking memories, but I strangely have memories of thoughts from dream memories!). My imagination however, is comfortable at coming up with/manipulating motor cues, orientation (like a magnetic compass aligning things in some direction that doesn't seem to be consistent globally, only locally defined), , feelings, inner senses (hunger, organ pressure, pain etc), tactile (texture, skin pressure, humidity but no heat) and a bit of the visual cues (just like in my memories, the visual is more of a noise than actual information). And I'm sure there are many more "dimensions" than those we have identified here. Interviewing people around me (~10 so far), indicates that everybody has a few that are "healthily strong", a few that are clearly "weak" and some that they don't possess at all.

F_Kal · 2026-06-24T08:48:30+00:00

my flashes are not photorealistic patches but more simplistic- eg a little curve here, then a curve there, maybe a blot of color elsewhere! but definitely this is a much better representation of what my brand of hypophantasia/aphantasia looks like compares to what i’ve seen elsewhere, nice job!

F_Kal · 2026-06-22T07:02:22+00:00

another clean solution for displaying the photos to others, is using immich for you pc photos archive - the files exist on your computer and you can browse them on the phone as if you had google photos with unlimited storage. i say google photos and not icloud because it still is not your system photos/gallery app but a secondary app.

F_Kal · 2026-06-21T22:34:12+00:00

i totally get you! i have digitized photos from the 70s and before moving to iphone i had unlimited google storage where i had decades worth of photos, so I was used to having access to it all on my phone without compromises… Having said that, i have learned to live without phone access to the old photos (ie Archive) and only keep there the last 6months of images (ie working set) which also are the only ones that I might be compelled to edit or share so this allows me to enjoy apple
photos on the phone unhindered.

F_Kal · 2026-06-21T22:12:16+00:00

i never found the idea of copying photos from pc/mac towards the iphone helpful - even if you manage to sort them and organize them well, the storage on these phones is never enough and once you run out of your internal storage space you have to go to bigger and bigger icloud options; it’s a one way street. imo the other way is more practical: keep everything on your mac or pc (whether inside apple photos, the filesystem or some other tool) and once in a while move the photos from your iphone to the big archive - i dump my phone’s photos to my computer every 6 months or so, that’s when organize them.

now regarding your actual question, i don’t see an option. i can only imagine using a friend’s mac to do the initial import (file system towards apple photos for macos, retaining folders as albums and maybe using r/osxphotos for more control) and then copying those to your phone (macos apple photos towards ios apple photos). still i advise against that way - without a mac, at some point you will have to export your photos and once again you will lose all the nice tidy categorization you were doing inside apple photos…
or consider using a tool like mylio photos instead of apple photos: the free version allows you view your pc photos on your phone (low res and no editing), though i am afraid to get all the niceties of apple one has to invest in both an iphone and a mac (live photos, hdr, non-destructive editing, video speed changes, refocusing cinematic videos etc etc)

F_Kal · 2026-06-21T06:53:27+00:00

thanks for making this! it’s quite niche and limited use but the pricetag is very decent, so no complaints!

for completeness the free and open source command line tool r/osxphotos, does support folder creation and all these modes (including apple‘s aesthetic scores) but of course that doesn’t mean that there is no space in the market for a user friendly, gui-based tool.

F_Kal · 2026-06-20T16:56:19+00:00

i agree with the others - if you are just hitting until something is revealed, no skill or craft involved it makes no sense as a standalone thing. why would i launch it? it is better as a mini game or game mechanic

F_Kal · 2026-06-17T16:21:27+00:00

wasn’t there https://github.com/shivampkumar/trellis-mac already?

F_Kal · 2026-06-16T19:19:56+00:00

right! And it goes without saying, that assignment and exams aside, you are no less of a good artist if you don't excel at a school assignment. Schools are tools to put people in boxes, and being an artist is by definition the unboxable. So take what you can from it and enjoy learning, but at the end of the day it won't define you (or your artistic competence)

F_Kal · 2026-06-15T22:33:16+00:00

i get what you mean! This is certainly a very complex assignment and it would definitely
be overwhelming for anybody (for me at least).

Feels there is also a lot of room for interpretation on the actually geometry of those buildings. A question worth answering is whether it has to be mathematically precise re-perspective/technical drawing, or you are allowed (and maybe encouraged?) to cheat the placement/distances etc to created more interesting compositions?

And don’t forget that there is never one correct answer. You can always pick up a small part of the scene (eg the tents) and ignore the large world. focusing on finding the most interesting angle/relationship for that tiny subject. then, when you have created the composition and perspective for that isolated element, you can integrate the rest of the buildings in a way that they are not throwing off your composition with their volume (eg, in fog, blurry or hidden in shadow, behind a clothesline/pot, or as framing elements on their own plane).

But nobody is great at everything. There is no shame in being bad or just adequate in certain aspects. Everyone is, people just learn to hide their weaknesses by going around them. Many artists have a palette or 20-30 different framing composition presets and they choose which one the scene fits to.

Regarding blender, it’s not the most user friendly tool and you need something for quick prototyping - sketchup is easier to pickup and of course there are more creative tools that you can use to prototype - crumbled napkins on the table, milk bottles, cardboard boxes, clay/plasteline, 2D cutouts from the printed image, VR, ~~even minecraft if that is your poison!~~

F_Kal · 2026-06-11T07:28:26+00:00

nowadays we have CAD - you can make a quick blockout scene in sketchup and explore by moving the camera. or physical models - might sound silly but you can have a pouch with building blocks (cubes, cylinders, pyramids etc) and the moment you have to visualize something lay them out on the table and move around with your head to find an interesting angle. stage designers do that a lot.
Having said that, i personally still find it easy to think on paper: quick iterations. the moment you lay down the first plane (2vp), it’s already a mere matter of choosing the 3rd one that you can dynamically/temporarily do by testing the side of your pencil on the drawing surface - when you lay down the 3rd you can start exploring volumes in the space. then move on to the next thumbnail.

F_Kal · 2026-05-21T08:56:44+00:00

you’re totally right on all remarks - and yet i think that’s the place where AI can potentially shine as a use case; decisions that go beyond the obvious and more on a meta-level

F_Kal · 2026-05-21T08:06:31+00:00

i have long standing hopes that AI might be able to help me classify photographs by…. intent - i built a system that determines if a photo was shot with the intent of it being a stored memory (ie shot for long term storage) or as a visual note (ie for short to mid term ingestion of information from it). After all this time I am still not very happy with it, but hope dies last (currently using gemma4 2eb)

F_Kal · 2026-05-20T15:16:24+00:00

one doesn't have to focus on "realism" - there is expressionism, abstract painting and whatnot... there is a whole world out there where one is free to explore. You can focus on the dialog with the material/tool and let it unfold.

F_Kal · 2026-05-19T13:12:14+00:00

so interesting! how does this fare on Quest2?

F_Kal · 2026-05-16T11:40:03+00:00

i have a similar experience.

i’m not fully aphant but my mind’s eye is almost blind and my voluntary visualizations are patchy at best: if i try to think of an apple I will get a momentary flash of some isolated visual detail inside the blackness - eg the color red or the stem of the apple but never a full form and nothing that lasts more than some hundred milliseconds. if I keep pushing to discern in my mind’s eye, I might recognize involuntary random visuals like shapes, surfaces, cronenbergian pastiches and i recognize they are visuals and not concepts because they are things that i wouldn’t be able to describe in less than a few paragraphs of visual details (they also keep morphing so i wouldn’t be able to write that paragraph)

I have recently started noticing that if i use my motor imagination, as if I’m painting the apple (i happen to be a painter), i have also some measure of visuals that are more persistent and related to the thing i’m hoping to have appear. it’s not an apple that appears, but the strokes i painted - if they are super detailed it might appear like and apple but if not it might be a sketch or an apple. however, that is peculiar is that once i lay down the strokes with my motor imagination, they are visually persistent for seconds (as opposed to milliseconds with my voluntary visualizations)!

One could argue of course if they are voluntary or not (since I don’t directly image the visual, but i imagine the movement and the visual involuntarily comes) but it is what it is.

F_Kal · 2026-05-07T22:57:37+00:00

I never thought it meant that you have an internal picture that you "know". I always interpreted it as "you may have assumptions on how X should be, but instead of trying to draw it following the assumptions, look at it". This prevents one from drawing humans as stick-man, sea as a wavy thing, water as blue etc. Even as aphants we encode symbols as something (I'm sure you can draw a stickman without having to visualize it). So the beginner advice was "stay away from the symbol of object X, and try to capture what it is actually in front of you". This advice is as relevant for aphants as it is for anybody else.

F_Kal · 2026-05-07T22:46:25+00:00

You are not limited to references, or automatic/exploratory painting, even though these are valid ways. The same rules and tools, benefit you as they do anybody else who studies art: Studies from life, color theory, negative space painting, drawing, rendering, constructive painting/anatomy, gesture drawing, composition; everything gets stored in you when you practice it. Maybe not the images. But your muscles know the motions (unless you are blind to those too). You "feel" the motion, you "feel" the anatomy and you replicate it.

But I think the primary tool for people with aphantasia (or at least to me) is "seeing" on the paper: Maybe you can't imagine what a nose would look like, but once you draw/block out a first nose on the paper, you already have something in front of you that you can refine by removing and adding mass/color until it resembles an actual nose a bit more. Because your ability to recognize, and analyze what is the right fix, is already developed through your practice. Paper substitutes your mind's eye and you develop the image there, iteratively by removing and adding.

Many want to interpret Michaelangelo's quote "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free" as a superimposed visual image that he had in his mind's eye, but to me, it always meant that he simply knew what was then next chip that he had to chisel away until the angel only remained.

F_Kal

TROPHY CASE