I noticed today, while playing around with a 1967 photograph of the collapse of The North Pole’s roof (ironically) by heavy snow, that I was playing around with my 100th time travel vignette. It’s a hobby I developed a year or two ago, combining a bunch of random skills and tricks I’ve acquired over my life, set to my personal interests (local history) and facilitated by the natural way my brain functions. Specifically, the constant layering of concepts and images atop one another for purposes of finding similarities and projecting possibilities by association. Mapping. Metaphor. Isometric overlay. The foundation of ‘natural intelligence’ itself perhaps.
For this hobby, the first thing I do is memorize my own town. Deep dive every street, hill, river, and interesting structure. Explore, observe, and commit to memory everything about the geography and topography of the town and area I can, over multiple years.
The second is browse the historical archives and the thousands of photos that have been added, looking for two things: something interesting, whatever the photo happens to be of, and something familiar- a sense of place, of knowing where the photo was taken based on the background, the slope of the land, street signs sometimes, familiar buildings, etc.
This is my first overlay- the overlay of the images in front of me, with the systemic image in my mind of the town, looking for hits. Once a good one is found that meets criteria, I tap into my geocaching days and physically go to wherever the photo was taken, with the photo in hand. Using trigonometry and various landmarks available- sometimes using old maps laid over new before going to the site- I triangulate the exact x, y, z axis and angle/orientation the older photo was taken, and take it again from the same place.
From there I go home and import the images into photoshop, where I layer them over one another in a literal sense, and scale/resize them by hand- a skill I picked up from a photo developing job I had back when film was still used more than digital photos. I line it up so that every existing landmark in the old photo is laid perfectly underneath their modern counterparts in the new, and I export the images into video software, where I cross dissolve them together for transition effect.
Then I sit back and watch what changes, and what stays the same, as two points in time are blended together in a single moment. It never gets old to me. Each one I do a little different, depending on my whims. Sometimes I’ll use AI engines to colorize or animate people subtly to help with immersion, and when I am satisfied with the video my final cherry on top step is to bring it into Tiktok or Instagram and use their native editing software to add an appropriate song or ambient loop that seems to “overlay” well with the scene. My final isomorph for the process.
When I was a senior in high school, way back in 2000, I had a bunch of moron teachers insisting that I go to college by whatever means necessary. At the time I had no idea what careers were actually available, in demand, or what they were even like. The loose association between whatever my interests were and what my career should be didn’t compute to me.
The amount of kids shoved into the psychology or social services fields, which are all pretty miserable professions unless you enjoy sitting on your ass and dealing with the dregs of society, just because kids have a natural and healthy interest in psychology and human beings in general, was astounding and astoundingly stupid.
A job is not its subject. Psychology is not an exploration of the mind and of people- it is an exploration of sitting at a desk reading horrifyingly boring books written by dead men. There was never any information offered on A) what careers would be ACTUALLY viable in the future, and B) what the important aspects of those careers actually was, and what the actual nuts and bolts of doing the job was actually like- and what type of personality, introverted or extroverted, etc- would suit it best. Nothing. Nada.
Just a bunch of morons in the education system strongly suggesting that a lifetime of unforgivable debt was a good investment on things they couldn’t tell us anything meaningful about. And even though I wasn’t one of them, I don’t blame kids for falling for that. Not one bit. That’s manipulation of the young, by the old, as always for purposes of sucking up their wealth and labor in this our corporatist ponzi scheme.
Since high school I would say, life has been the slow and sad realization that people- even the ones we assume and consider to be the very best of us- are largely clueless. We can’t even get a handle on what we think, or why. We don’t know what order our thoughts and our emotions go in- which one follows the other.
There is this tempting fantasy people have that intellect is man’s greatest virtue. It pairs with this notion that somewhere in the world there is some kind of hidden leadership calling the shots, orchestrating events in the world for their own nefarious gain. This thought comforts us because it implies that top-down management with the right amount of intelligence and resources is possible- therefore, it might be possible to take the reigns from the selfish nefarious sorts, and steer humanity more towards Star Trek than 1984.
Unfortunately, this is not the way of things.
We do not, by and large, use intellect and reason to perceive reality and then, based on that, behave in ways that are conducive and beneficial TO it, and us. We only use intellect and reason to warp reality into something conducive to the deepest parts of ourselves that we have no access to, oversight of, or control over. Two people who find a shared interpretation of reality are just two people who have found a shared interpretation of themselves, deep down. We do not think, and then act. We act, and then think of why the world made us do it.
Projection, in other words. You don’t “hate women,” you hate whatever unseen and inaccessible part of yourself is rejected by almost all of them. Almost all of the action that takes place in the world is a product of unseeable things- instincts, emotions, random luck opportunities.
Some things CAN be willed into existence. But a people and a society and a world are not among them.
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