Comments on Existence is Wonderful: On The Discovery of The Eyeball Conspiracy

Tera: Ha, possibly. One other thing I notic...

2009-07-09T20:19:20.375-07:00

Tera: Ha, possibly. One other thing I notice about that site is that it has a very "generic" domain, one of the type that tends to be coveted by people trying to be taken seriously.

And I might have also liked red glasses as a kid. I think I wanted black or wire rimmed ones though mostly.

Oh, my gawd--eyeroll. Obviously. myopia.org is ...

2009-07-09T16:56:11.690-07:00

Oh, my *gawd*--eyeroll.

Obviously. myopia.org is just a smokescreen for the REAL conspiracy, which is to put children in ginormous plastic glasses. (Mine were red. Although, I liked them. I think I picked them out, even).

Stephanie: Yeah for me I just dyed my hair ...

2009-07-07T18:53:48.513-07:00

Stephanie: Yeah for me I just dyed my hair because I always wanted it that color. Sort of like wanting a certain color shirt, just with hair.

And re. contacts: you don't actually have to poke your eyeball with your finger to get the contact in, but it still does feel really weird, and I don't miss it at all. I didn't realize what a pain contacts were for a long time until I stopped wearing them.

I could never wear contacts: something about stic...

2009-07-07T17:39:23.848-07:00

I could never wear contacts: something about sticking my finger in my eye sends chills down my spine.

I dyed my hair blue, once. I don't really know why. Since I didn't know what I was doing it ended up coming out a kind of washed-out turquoise; my hair is naturally a dirty blonde so I simply thought the deep blue would come out deep blue on my hair.

But I don't mess with that stuff anymore although I've thought about it.

There's better quality natural vision improvem...

2009-07-07T06:15:47.531-07:00

There's better quality natural vision improvement available than seems to have crossed any of your paths.

I've done some work with it, and my vision-- especially for far distances and at night -- is definitely better.

I've studied with Robert Lichtman, who teaches that vision can be improved through better, more relaxed vision habits. He also doesn't teach that the conventional approach is a conspiracy, just that it's mistaken.

I do NOT know where to even begin. What a crazy co...

2009-07-07T05:48:27.699-07:00

I do NOT know where to even begin. What a crazy conspiracy theory site! I guess at least it isn't JFK related, though I did wonder if a pinhole eyeglasses company could have created to send people packing to buy their stuff. (Hey, it happens in virtual land!)

This is my first time to your blog and I love it. You have a terrific sense of humor and writing style. And LUV the hair! Totally rocks.

Lindsay:
Hehe no worries about the thr...

2009-07-06T22:54:40.054-07:00

Lindsay:

Hehe no worries about the threadjack, I don't mind explaining how I made my hair blue. It did involve bleach, as my natural color is dark brown and interesting colors (my favorite hair-shades of which being blue and green) do not show up on it in its pristine state.

The bleach part is unpleasant and I don't do it very often, but when I do do it, I mix powder bleach and 40 volume developer (my younger sister the beauty maven taught me about developers) which are quite cheap, and let it sit on the parts of my hair I want to bleach for 15 - 20 minutes usually. Then I rinse it out, dry my hair, and apply the dye, which is of the semi-permanent variety (my favorites being Manic Panic, in the shades of "After Midnight Blue", "Black and Blue", and "Enchanted Forest") and has a conditioning effect, which softens the impact of the bleach.

I've had blue or green (or, occasionally, purple) hair for about the past 4 years, with occasional periods of brown or black in between as I sometimes give my hair a break or get too busy or distracted for upkeep. But at this point my hair actually doesn't even need a whole lot of upkeep, as I've managed to saturate it so much with the semi-permanent dye that it doesn't wash out to bleachy yellow but to a mellow turquioise! And it really does feel like these colors are, well, "natural" on me. I have never understood why some dye colors are considered "weirder" than others...IMO it isn't any more "natural" to dye your hair blonde if you are brunette than to dye your hair green, it still involves altering what is there.

I started dyeing my hair just because I liked the way it looked, and that is still my primary motivation, but I have also found that it can sometimes sort of help reduce the assumptions people make about me. Oddly enough it seems almost like I get treated more respectfully with blue hair, and I wonder if it has something to do with possibly distracting from "odd body language" or something.

Lindsay:
Heh, yeah, I know what you me...

2009-07-06T22:42:45.792-07:00

Lindsay:

Heh, yeah, I know what you mean about screens...I am the same way. I even get annoyed trying to doodle on lined paper (unless I'm drawing things with lines in them) because the lines are always THERE, and I also cannot stand it when my glasses are smudgy or have bits on them. The pinhole thing is interesting but I wouldn't like having glasses like that on all the time, it would be very obnoxious.

And re. contacts: the eye thing was never something I enjoyed, but as when I was wearing them I spent a period riding my bike a lot (including in the rain), it was a bit easier to maintain visual clarity with contacts vs. glasses, which I would have wanted to be perpetually wiping the rain off while riding.

I stopped wearing contacts soon after starting at my current job about six years ago because the air in the office is so dry and awful that my eyeballs were getting uncomfortable and red by the afternoon every day. And nowadays I don't think I would ride my bike in the rain anyway as it is rather dangerous I've realized. And I like the glasses I have now so I happily wear them.

And re. the reading thing: yeah, I remember people yelling at me when I was little to "stop trying to read in the dark", even though when they were saying this I wasn't perceiving it AS dark. And also when I was about twelve (and was allowed to get giant blue glasses, which I somehow saw as an improvement over pink, though the shape was just as hideous), I actually had bifocals for a while in which the bottom half was a weaker prescription because the optometrist though that might reduce eyestrain because I read so much. But reducing eyestrain is not the same thing as preventing or "curing" myopia!

fledchen wrote: While it is technicall...

2009-07-06T20:54:38.632-07:00
fledchen wrote:

While it is technically true that there are muscles that change the shape of the lens when focusing, no amount of exercising them is going to correct a defective lens. The notion that focusing on near objects weakens these muscles and distorts the lens is also rubbish.

YES. This. When I was reading that "yay for pinholes!" site last night they were going on about the supposed effectiveness of these exercises in ways that made me wonder if they'd ever bothered reading any kind of anatomy text.

My guess is that at best, moving (or not moving) your eyeballs around in certain ways could impact how much eyestrain you experience, which could affect vision to some extent -- but none of that is going to impact the actual structure of the lens or the eyeball!

That's like...I don't know, this is probably a bad analogy, but it seems to me like suggesting that by doing leg-stretching exercises you can make yourself taller. Sure, you might gain some additional flexibility from doing so, but you aren't going to somehow lengthen the bones, etc.

(This is a particularly irritating kind of pseudoscience because it takes a few things that are kinda sorta true and throws them into a context where they don't make a lot of sense, and then tacks on all this additional conspiracy baggage...ugh!)

I'm severely myopic and I also happen to be legally blind. It's enormously confusing to people when I have to explain that my myopia isn't what has rendered me legally blind. No, thicker glasses won't fix it. No, laser surgery won't fix it. No, a cornea transplant won't fix it. No, an eye transplant won't fix it because there is no such thing. My problem is actually neurological, which people don't understand at all. Eyes don't see by themselves, they need the brain to control them and to interpret the light patterns that hit the retina. The easiest explanation that I give people is that my eyes and my brain don't like to talk to each other.

Huh, interesting. I have actually heard of that kind of thing, though, and it makes sense...if your brain isn't processing the signals your eyes receive into coherent patterns, then you aren't going to be able to make much sense of what you are looking at -- and that could occur equally in a myopic and non-myopic person.

My mom made me wear those horrible giant ugly pink plastic glasses, too. Ugh.

Eek! I have to wonder how many kids had to deal with those now...seems to be a theme here!

JEmerson: The 90s seemed like a revolu...

2009-07-06T20:53:48.034-07:00
JEmerson:

The 90s seemed like a revolution, in that someone, somewhere, figured out that glasses don't have to be ugly.

Well, perhaps a "second-wave revolution" -- some of the frames from the 1950s and 1960s were pretty darn cool, as were some of the earlier Victorian-era models (the kind with the wire frames). I think the late 1970s and 1980s were just a horrible vintage for glasses!

I too have the old photos of me as a child of the 80s, in GIANT glasses.

Heh...someone needs to start a site (along the lines of Awkward Family Photos, perhaps) where people can go and submit their 1980s glasses pics...yeesh, I bet that would be a scary collection!

The funny thing is, I was totally not fashion-conscious as a kid. Seriously, I barely gave clothing a second thought aside from whether or not it was comfortable and matched my own personal preferences. I didn't care about looking like other people (that whole idea still seems bizarre to me) -- I just had strong aesthetic aversions to certain things, and those GIANT PINK GLASSES (GPGs?) were one of those things. They just made my face look like...well, not my face, which was freaky.

I used to stand in front of the mirror with and without the GPGs and was completely wigged out by how it looked like two completely different people. Whereas my new glasses don't have quite so much of that effect...they blend better with my face somehow and don't make me unrecognizable to myself.

Interesting is well is how a genetic quirk has so much play in fiction. All it really means is that someone's eyesight is a bit off, but we put so much odd cultural significance on it. From the conspiracy nuts you found, to hollywood stereotypes.

Yeah - I suspect it has something to do with the significance humans tend to place on faces. Glasses are right there on the face and hence going to be prominent in any situation where the person's face isn't completely covered up.

(Also, that blue hair you have in the second pictu...

2009-07-06T19:09:34.887-07:00
(Also, that blue hair you have in the second picture is beautiful!! I love exotic hair colors on other people, but have never dyed my own hair anything other than black or red, since I don't want to bleach my hair, and bright colors don't show up on dark hair. But your hair is quite a bit darker than mine; did you have to bleach it to get that color to show?)

/threadjack

Oh, that's hilarious. I'm myopic, too ---...

2009-07-06T19:07:57.547-07:00
Oh, that's hilarious.

I'm myopic, too --- around 20/70 --- and have been since I was about 11. (Before that, I didn't need glasses! OMG, could it have been all that ... reading??)

I've never tried wearing contacts, because the idea of putting something in my eye scares me. I'm extremely defensive about my body and its boundaries.

The pinhole glasses thing would so not work for me --- I have trouble seeing things through screened windows and doors, since I can't seem to look past the screen. Colors and shapes are about all I can perceive that way.

The thing about reading making you lose your eyesight is really old --- I think I remember coming across that idea in the Canterbury Tales. The Clerk, I think.

There's also a whole quack industry out there ...

2009-07-06T13:08:04.213-07:00
There's also a whole quack industry out there promoting eye exercises to "strengthen weak eyes" and correct myopia. While it is technically true that there are muscles that change the shape of the lens when focusing, no amount of exercising them is going to correct a defective lens. The notion that focusing on near objects weakens these muscles and distorts the lens is also rubbish.

I'm severely myopic and I also happen to be legally blind. It's enormously confusing to people when I have to explain that my myopia isn't what has rendered me legally blind. No, thicker glasses won't fix it. No, laser surgery won't fix it. No, a cornea transplant won't fix it. No, an eye transplant won't fix it because there is no such thing. My problem is actually neurological, which people don't understand at all. Eyes don't see by themselves, they need the brain to control them and to interpret the light patterns that hit the retina. The easiest explanation that I give people is that my eyes and my brain don't like to talk to each other.

My mom made me wear those horrible giant ugly pink plastic glasses, too. Ugh.

The 90s seemed like a revolution, in that someone,...

2009-07-06T09:15:02.446-07:00
The 90s seemed like a revolution, in that someone, somewhere, figured out that glasses don't have to be ugly. I too have the old photos of me as a child of the 80s, in GIANT glasses.

Interesting is well is how a genetic quirk has so much play in fiction. All it really means is that someone's eyesight is a bit off, but we put so much odd cultural significance on it. From the conspiracy nuts you found, to hollywood stereotypes.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassesTropes

Comments on Existence is Wonderful: On The Discovery of The Eyeball Conspiracy

Tera: Ha, possibly. One other thing I notic...

Oh, my *gawd*--eyeroll. Obviously. myopia.org is ...

Stephanie: Yeah for me I just dyed my hair ...

I could never wear contacts: something about stic...

There's better quality natural vision improvem...

I do NOT know where to even begin. What a crazy co...

Lindsay: Hehe no worries about the thr...

Lindsay: Heh, yeah, I know what you me...

fledchen wrote: While it is technicall...

JEmerson: The 90s seemed like a revolu...

(Also, that blue hair you have in the second pictu...

Oh, that's hilarious. I'm myopic, too ---...

There's also a whole quack industry out there ...

The 90s seemed like a revolution, in that someone,...

Oh, my gawd--eyeroll. Obviously. myopia.org is ...

Lindsay:
Hehe no worries about the thr...

Lindsay:
Heh, yeah, I know what you me...