Books read in August 2019

New:

1. Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America by Peniel E. Joseph
2. The Ghost and Lone Warrior by C.J. Taylor
3. Point Your Face at This: Drawings by Demetri Martin
4. Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities by Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey

Reread:

1. Holiday in Death
2. Midnight in Death

Things the City of Toronto Should Invent: natural gardens as of right

When I read this recent story about how the City of Toronto doesn't allow lawns made of artificial turf, my first thought was to wonder if there are City by-laws unintentionally incentivizing artificial turf, perhaps by having strict aesthetic standards for lawns.

So I went a-googling, and discovered that if you want to have a natural garden (as opposed to a lawn), you have to apply for an exemption.

I think that's bass-ackwards.

In addition to the drainage issues that the ban on artificial turf is trying to address, a natural garden would help with pollinators, native species, and biodiversity. Growing food in residential yards would also boost the city's food sovereignty and sustainability (as well as urban biodiversity, and probably pollinators too.)

In contrast, a lawn is...green and flat.  And that's about it.

It's monoculture, it doesn't contribute to biodiversity or pollination, I think it might even be an invasive species. 

If the City's priority is green and flat, they should allow artificial turf.

If the City's priorities are environmental, they should allow natural gardens as of right, so people don't have to apply for an exemption, they can just go ahead and have a natural garden - including by neglecting their lawn and letting it revert to nature in its own time.

But let's be brave and bold and take this a step further: what if we make natural gardens the default, and require an exemption for lawns?

"But lawns are important!"

Then it shouldn't be too difficult to get an exemption - just apply for an exemption telling them about why it's so important.

"How do you propose we transition existing lawns to natural gardens?"

I'm a huge fan of benign neglect myself. But when it comes to designing actual policy, a good starting point would be to look at how transitions are normally handled when there's a change in property standards, identify weaknesses in past transitions, and adjust to eliminate those weaknesses.

Age of majority

In the English-speaking world at least, ages of majority are weird.  It tends to be 18, 19 or 21.  But never 20.  Why are they avoiding the only round number in the general range?

I know the age of majority of 21 originally comes from England centuries ago - it was the age of majority for the purposes of marriage without a parent's consent in Jane Austen - but it's not easy (and certainly not readily googleable) to find how they landed on that particular age.

People's instinctive answer is going to be "because that's when you stop being teenage-like and start being adult-like," but I wonder about the actual cause and effect there. It's a lot easier to actually be adult-like when you are legally and socially permitted to! Fifteen-year-olds may well be sufficiently adult-like within a social structure that allows them adult roles, and doesn't require them to be in child roles (e.g. in school) by default and/or to achieve long-term success.

The other interesting thing about 21 as an age of majority (at least in historical England) is people under the age of 21 could easily fulfill adult roles in a society where formal education was far from the norm and there were no other obligations specific to teenagers. A 20-year-old, or a 17-year-old, or probably even a 13-year-old, would have been doing work that is comparable to their parents' work. I wonder why societal structures kept them legally dependent for what seems like an awfully long time?

As someone who was a legal adult for years before I was an adult economic actor (I was a full-time student until the age of 22, but a legal adult at 18) I wonder what it would have been like to be an adult economic actor but not a legal adult?

I'm going to have to find a book on this or something - there's a lot of interesting stuff in here, and I'm sure some of it has been documented as history and/or sociology.

And I still wonder why the age of majority is so rarely the nice round number of 20?

Loving your child is necessary but insufficient

In a recent Twitter thread where people were discussing why they wouldn't tell their fathers if they were raped, one commenter made a reply to the effect of "This is why I make sure my kids know that I'll love them no matter what."

(I'm not linking directly to the thread or quoting the comment directly because I don't want to pile on to this individual. You frequently hear this kind of comment from a wide range of parents, and my thoughts in this post apply in most, if not all, of these cases.)

Loving your child is important. Loving your child no matter what is the right thing to do.

And, in my capacity as my parents' child, the question of whether they love me is completely irrelevant to the question of whether I'd go to them in an emergency or tell them about a traumatic experience.

My parents' love for me is internal to them. They feel it inside themselves.

What's relevant to me is external to them - their words and actions as I perceive and experience them (which, unfortunately, includes their failed attempts to hide their emotional response).

If I believe my parents' response to a situation will be useful to me, I will go to them for help and support. If it isn't useful to me - for example, if it frustrates me or requires additional emotional labour from me or even just doesn't contribute anything that I can't already contribute myself - I won't go to them.

It is possible for a parent to love their child and also be unhelpful.  It is also possible for someone to not love you but be supremely helpful.

If it is important to you for your kids to come to you in an emergency, be a person who is helpful in that kind of emergency, and provide your kid with a lifetime's empirical evidence that you're a person who is helpful in that kind of emergency.  Not just that you will feel the right feelings, that your words and actions will be what they actually need.

Brown corduroy pants

The very first piece of clothing I ever owned that made me feel good in my post-puberty body was, weirdly enough, a pair of brown corduroy pants.

It was the mid-90s and I was in my mid-teens. I didn't feel good about corduroy on principle (it's what the frumpiest adults of my acquaintance wore, and in Grade 1 my elementary school classmates had laughed at the noise my knock-kneed legs made in my red corduroy pants), but these were different.  They were what I now know to be called a finer wale, almost like velvet. They were on-trend for that time and place - either boot-cut or flared (my teenage self didn't know the different), low slung and a bit baggy.

This shape was both flattering to my curves and comfortable to sit in. (The first time I had experienced both since Mother Nature had seen fit to give me adult curves as a preteen!). With sandals and a tank top, it evoked a sort of hippy look (something I admired and aspired to, although I've never been cool enough). With boots and my new awesome peacoat, it evoked a sort of retro 70s look (which was what the kids who were cooler than I could have ever imagined were going for).  Both these looks worked well with my long straight hair - the first time in my life my natural hair has actually helped an aesthetic, given that my life thus far had taken place in the era of big 80s hair!

In short, this was the first time either "flattering", "comfortable" and "fashionable" were ever within reach for me - and I got all three for one!

I wore them so much they eventually got holes in undignified places and I couldn't wear them any more. But those pants opened the door: I could feel good about myself in clothes! I could achieve looks that I aspired to!  I learned more about what shapes and colours are flattering to the particularities of my body, I bought more clothes that make me feel good about myself, and I grew up to be a well-dressed grownup lady - something my preteen self never dared dream of!

The other day, I saw a poster outside a mall store where the model's outfit included brown corduroy pants that appeared to be boot cut.  They didn't have them in store, but I hope they come in as part of the fall collection and they fit me.  I still think brown and corduroy are both objectively frumpy, but I would love to have something in my closet that reminds me of feeling good about myself for the very first time.

Things CRA Should Invent: automated phone system tells you whether they've actually called you

I recently had to call CRA to deal with some boring grownup stuff.

Everyone I talked to was awesome and helpful and extremely patient with my ignorance, the boring grownup stuff got dealt with, but before that could happen I had to wait half an hour on hold for someone to help me.

This is a problem in light of the ongoing telephone scam where they call you and impersonate CRA.

CRA encourages you to call their 800 number if you're unsure about the legitimacy of a call you received, but that's a problem when the hold times are so long - especially since they're only open 9-5 Monday to Friday.  Someone who also works 9-5 Monday to Friday, only gets half an hour for lunch and isn't at liberty to make phone calls while working might not ever be able to get through!

I propose a solution: CRA should have an option to automatically detect your phone number and have the automatic system tell you whether they're trying to get in touch with you.

For example, "If you've received a call claiming to be from CRA and would like to confirm whether CRA is trying to get in touch with you, press 3."

I believe this is technologically possible.  When you call Rogers, their system says something like "I notice you are calling from a phone number ending in ####. To talk about the account associated with this number, press 1."  This means an automated system can compare the number you're calling from with numbers in a database, and route your call accordingly.

CRA could maintain a database of "numbers we have called and left messages with", and have an option in their automated system to compare callers' numbers with this database.  That way, callers who are trying to check whether the CRA call they received was a scam can get a quick, automatic message saying "We have not made any attempt to contact you by phone, no action is required on your part."

In fact, since this could be done automatically, it wouldn't even have to be done during business hours!  You call whenever, press 3, and you get a message saying either "We have not made any attempt to contact you by phone, no action is required on your part" or "We have been attempting to contact you by phone, please call us back during business hours."

This way there are far fewer barriers to avoiding scams, and human telephone representatives could be freed up for work that actually requires humans.

Other organizations that are frequently impersonated by scam callers (banks, utilities, etc.) could also use this system. I just think it's particularly important for CRA given their limited business hours and long hold times.

The Segoe UI font is easy to read with convergence insufficiency and accommodative insufficiency resulting from head trauma

Recently, for the first time since my head injury, I received a text to translate that I could actually read effortlessly!

I immediately checked what the font was, and it turns out it's called Segoe UI.  I changed my default Firefox font to Segoe UI, and now life is so much easier!

So if you're ever looking for a font that's effortlessly readable with convergence insufficiency and accommodative insufficiency resulting from head trauma, Segoe UI fits the bill!

I'm working on adding Segoe UI to my blog's style sheet so everyone can enjoy its effortless readability (just plugging it in turned out to mess up the font size, so I need to do some tweaking).

However, I'm not the audience of my blog - in fact, I am the one person in the world who has the least need to find my blog readable! - so if at any point you find the font has become less readable, leave me a comment to let me know, ideally articulating the specific problem (too big? too small? too fat? too skinny? too much of some other characteristic that I can't even fathom?)

Books read in July 2019

New:

1. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
2. Pride by Ibi Zoboi

Reread:

1. Ceremony in Death
2. Vengeance in Death

Things They Should Invent: vastly different-sounding words for "credit" and "debit"

Many cash registers require the cashier to push one button if you're paying by credit card and another button if you're paying by debit card.

Problem: the words sound very similar, so there's a high likelihood that the cashier will mishear you when you tell them how you're paying. Then they'll have to re-input the transaction, wasting everyone's time and messing up their numbers.

Solution: words for "credit" and "debit" that are completely different.  Like one is "plop" and the other is "oogly-boogly".

I suppose, on an individual level, we could state the name of the credit card (e.g. "Mastercard"), but that always makes me feel like I'm in a commercial.

Things They Should Invent: "you guys" gender map

Some people perceive "you guys" as masculine, even in the vocative case.

Others, such as myself, perceive it as having no element of gender.  "You guys" is a casual, inclusive vocative plural, completely unrelated to the masculine nominative singular "guy".

But I'm not here to convince you that I'm right.

I'm here to convince someone to map it.

One of the great moments of internet sociolinguistics is the Pop vs. Soda map, which shows the geographical patterns of American soft drink nomenclature.

Someone should do the same for whether "you guys" is masculine or gender-inclusive!

Based on the way people on the internet talk about the "you guys" question, I strongly suspect there's some geographical element to how it's received.  A crowdsourced mapping project, like Pop vs. Soda, could answer this question.

The technology exists, as evidenced by Pop vs. Soda. The answer would be informative, and help people better tailor their communication to various audiences. Surely there must be someone out there looking for a linguistics research project idea!

Things They Should Invent: make it socially acceptable to put a blanket over your head in public

Apparently there was recently a story in the news where an airline requires passengers who are breastfeeding babies to cover their breasts and the babies. I didn't see the story myself, but I did see a bunch of people on Twitter reacting with stories about how their babies would not accept being covered while nursing.

A snarky comment came to mind: "Maybe the people who are offended by breastfeeding should put blankets over their heads!"

Then I realized: that idea is actually kind of appealing!

When I was a small child (older than breastfeeding age - I don't remember that far back), I would sometimes put a towel or a blanket over my head and just sit there enjoying my little cone of silence and privacy. I was in a room full of people, but I couldn't see them and they couldn't see my face.

I've seen other small children do that too, so I think it isn't that uncommon.

I don't feel the temptation to put a blanket over my head as an adult, but that's because I have privacy most of the time. If I don't want look at people or have them look at me, I can go home and lock the door.

But you can't do that on an airplane. You're stuck in this little metal tube in close quarters with dozens (hundreds?) of other people for several hours.

Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to hide?

But the problem is we live in a society that is particularly wary of behaviour that is perceived to be irregular on an airplane. So even those of us who find the idea of hiding under a blanket appealing would be reluctant to do so for fear that someone will overreact and alert the authorities and the plane will be redirected to the nearest airport and surrounded by armed law enforcement and we'll be disappeared into some prison hellscape for the rest of eternity.

Solution: we as a society should unanimously declare it socially acceptable to put a blanket over your head whenever you need a moment's privacy. It's not feasible in every circumstance, of course - you couldn't do it while walking down the street - but there's no reason why you couldn't have a blanket over your head while sitting on an airplane or a train or a park bench. Even in an open-concept office, there's no reason why you couldn't put a blanket over your head and your monitor for some psychological privacy, if we would only deem it socially acceptable.

Even if you yourself can't imagine wanting to put a blanket over your head, wouldn't it be convenient if the other people around you - the ones who might complain that you're nursing your baby or staring at your phone too much or chewing in a way they find unattractive - felt free to do so?

In this modern world, we find ourselves increasingly forced into close quarters with other people, and tensions rise because of lack of privacy. But the only thing that's preventing us from taking a modicum of psychological privacy is that we've arbitrarily deemed it socially unacceptable.  Let's undo that.

Things Twitter Should Invent: retain hashtag capitalization

When you search for or click on a hashtag in Twitter, it shows you a feed of all tweets with that hashtag.  Useful!

If you then click on the "Tweet" button while this hashtag feed is open, it populates the tweet composition box with the hashtag in question, on the assumption that you're going to tweet using the hashtag in question. Useful!

Problem: Sometimes the hashtag that populates the tweet composition box is written in all lowercase, even if the hashtag you originally searched on or clicked on was written in a combination of capital and lowercase.

This is an issue because screen readers use the capitalization in hashtags to determine when a new word starts, and writing hashtags in all lowercase makes the screen reader attempt to pronounce the hashtag as all one word. And, aside from that, #CapitalizingEachWordLikeThis is easier to read than #writingthewholethinginlowercase.

What Twitter should do: make sure that any capitalization in the hashtag clicked on or searched for is retained when populating the tweet composition box. This means people who have already made the effort to make their hashtags accessible don't have to repeat that effort every time they tweet.

While writing this blog post, I tried to determine the specific conditions under which Twitter retains the capitalization of the hashtag versus when it changes it to all lowercase, and I wasn't able to pinpoint it with any consistency. All I can tell you is sometimes it retains capitalization, and sometimes it goes all lowercase.

However, the fact that it sometimes retains capitalization means that retaining capitalization is technologically possible, so Twitter should make that happen all the time.

Aidez-moi à transcrire les phrases français dans Let Me Go par Cake

This post is available in English here.

Les paroles de la chanson Let Me Go par Cake sont bien en anglais, mais il y a quelques phrases parlés en français, qui sont en-dessous de la mélodie et donc difficile à entendre.

Chaque fois que j’entends cette chanson, je me demande qu’est-ce que les mots français disent, mais je ne peux en comprendre que quelques mots.

J’ai effectué plusieurs recherches Internet pour ces mots français pendant les années, et il me semble que personne ne les a jamais transcrits.

Donc il nous incombe de le faire nous-mêmes.

Voici Let Me Go, au moment où le français commence.



Les quelques mot que j’entends : « ??? au contraire ??? conserver les échantillons ??? papier, plastique ??? »

Seriez-vous en mesure de combler les lacunes?

The French words in Let Me Go by Cake

Ce poste est disponible en français ici.

Every time I hear to the song Let Me Go by Cake, I wonder what the French words spoken under the melody line are saying.

I do understand French, but I'm also lyric deaf, so the music gets in the way of my hearing all the words (in any language).

Every time I wonder this at a time when it's convenient to google, I try to see if anyone on the recorded internet has written down what the French says, and I can never find anyone who has.

So we're going to have to do it ourselves.

Here is Let Me Go by Cake, cued up to the point where the French starts.



Here's what I hear:

"[unintelligible] au contraire [unintelligible] conserver les échantillons [unintelligible] papier, plastique [unintelligible]"

Can you fill in any gaps?

For those who don't speak French:

au contraire = the same as in English: literally "to the contrary", a general indicator of disagreement
conserver les échantillons = keep/store/preserve the samples
papier, plastique = paper, plastic

Wanted: emergency radio with long shelf life

Today I had a power outage for the first time in years, so it occurred to me that I should test my emergency radio.

And it turns out the battery doesn't hold a charge.  I keep the radio in a place where it gets direct sun every day, but when I turn it on the battery light blinks out after a second, before I can even tune it to a radio station.  The same thing happens when I crank it up - the battery appears to charge, but it doesn't hold the charge long enough to pick up a radio station, which, of course, defeats the purpose.

This happened with my previous emergency radio too. After a few years, the battery simply stopped holding a charge, rendering it useless.

Can anyone recommend an emergency radio that will retain functionality after years of neglect?

I'm willing and able to keep it somewhere where it gets direct sunlight every day for solar charging.  I'm also willing and able to keep it in the dark if constant charging is bad for battery life, but in that case I'd need it to charge fairly quickly (e.g. under 15 minutes) in normal indoor ambient light levels

Ideally, I'd also like to be able to charge devices with it. Alternatively, I'd be interested in any other gizmos that let me charge devices from solar and crank power - or even from the ordinary Duracell batteries I have sitting around in a desk drawer! - regardless of whether they have a radio.  A flashlight feature would also be a plus. (I already have multiple flashlights, but I wouldn't mind one that could charge by solar.)  But, again, these devices would need long shelf life, so I can neglect them for years and then they'll be ready for me in an emergency.

Interestingly, during this adventure, I discovered that the radio on my old middle-school Walkman still works beautifully if I just pop in a couple of the ordinary Duracell batteries that I have sitting around in my desk drawer.  So for an emergency device, I'd need better.

Brandingthink

On the front page of today's Globe and Mail, I noticed a small blurb about their logo:

On Monday The Globe and Mail is introducing the next evolution of our print nameplate.

The refreshed red logo is the same typeface and styling that appears online at the top of our homepage. By consolidating our print and digital designs, we are restating our dedication to groundbreaking journalism, no matter the platform.

This is interesting to me, and, in my capacity as a non-design person, I find myself pondering the thinking and process behind it - not the change in the logo, but the explanation and its wording.

Do they actually think that consolidating the design "restat[es their] dedication to groundbreaking journalism, no matter the platform"?  Or was there a committee sitting around the table trying to come up with something?

Or was this the wording of the design brief, and the designer produced the logo and asserted that it achieves these things?

It's also interesting to me that they felt it was necessary to print a statement of intent behind their logo change, rather than just printing the new logo. I don't know that I would have noticed. Or, if I did notice, I would have just though "Meh, newspapers change their design from time to time."

The fact that they printed a statement of intent leans towards the idea of someone actually thinking that changing the logo "restat[es their] dedication to groundbreaking journalism", because if they didn't think that, they could have just not printed an explanation rather than thinking up an explanation.  But, to my non-design brain, these things seem completely unrelated (like how my choice of font is completely unrelated to my commitment to a vegetarian lifestyle), so I'm intrigued that other people's brains can do this.

Books read in June 2019

New:

1. So You Want to Talk about Race by by Ijeoma Oluo
2. Hyperfocus: How to be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey 
3. As Long as the Rivers Flow by Larry Loyie 
4. Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen by Helen Rappaport

Reread:

1. Rapture in Death

How I made my sweaters stop acting like clutter

While searching for a different old post, I found this old post about trying to figure out a way to stop my sweaters from cluttering up my living room, and I realized that I've solved the problem at some point.

When I'm sitting at my desk and I have to remove a sweater, I stand up. Then, as I'm removing the sweater, I take two steps until I'm standing in the door of my bedroom. Then I throw the sweater on my bed.

This means I have to hang up the sweater before I can go to sleep because it's lying on my bed, but that isn't too much of an imposition because my bedtime routine already includes putting away clothes that have ended up on my bed in the course of the day. (For example, when I'm dressing in the morning, I tend to take off my bathrobe and throw it on my bed. If I change clothes when I get home, I tend to lie the old ones on my bed.)

Yes, a perfectly diligent person wouldn't leave clothes lying around on the bed and would instead put them away immediately. But we've already established that I'm not a perfectly diligent person, and throwing the sweaters on the bed instead of hanging them on my desk chair puts the sweaters closer to where they should be while preventing them from cluttering up the room where they shouldn't be.

I don't remember when or why I started doing this, but it solves my silly problem!

Phosphenes and false memories

When I was a little girl, I had an unsuitably early bedtime. I wasn't even tired until about 2 hours after my bedtime. (Not a good parenting strategy, BTW. I became incapable of falling asleep in less than 2 hours even when I was tired, and it took until I was nearly 30 to overcome this.)

However, when I was small I did want to be a good girl, so I would lie in bed with my eyes closed trying really hard to fall asleep.

But a small child doesn't have the inner resources to just lie there doing nothing. I needed something to amuse myself.  Something that I could do while lying in bed with my eyes closed.

So I started watching the colours that I saw behind my eyelids when I closed my eyes (which, I would learn decades later, are called phosphenes). They would move and morph of their own volition, making for an interesting light show.

After some time, I gradually gained control over how the phosphenes moved and morphed.  It never became easy to move them - imagine the nuance of playing a theramin combined with the force required to fight the repulsion of like magnetic poles - but with effort I could manipulate them. I made it into a game, with my goal being to produce a red and blue checkerboard (the reason why I chose a red and blue checkerboard was lost to history) and I was able to reach the checkerboard almost every night.

However, around the age of 8, I developed a new intellectual skill. At the time I called it "thinks", but I now know that it's called Mary Sue fanfiction - mentally writing stories inserting myself into various works of fiction. I found this a far more enjoyable way to spend the hours before I fell asleep, and my phosphenes fell by the wayside.

That pattern has continued ever since, with the addition of romantic fantasies once I reached the point in my life where that was of interest.  But every once in a while, during a bout of insomnia, I'd reach for the phosphenes again and find that I was out of practice, but could still manipulate them.

Until my head injury.

In the aftermath of my head injury, I completely lost the ability to daydream or fantasize. (It began returning 4 months later, but even now a year later, it's still not available 100% of the time like it was before the head injury.)

So, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, I reached for my phosphenes.

And they weren't there.

I could see a pattern that looked like a red and green lava lamp, but it wasn't moving at all. And, behind the lava lamp, I could see the eye of Sauron. But it wasn't my phosphenes. It was immovable, unchanging, and vaguely terrifying.

I spent a lot of time lying in bed with my eyes closed after my head injury, and this eye of Sauron was always staring back at me through the lava lamp. I couldn't control it, I couldn't change it, my old familiar patterns weren't there, and I couldn't even fantasize.

I wasn't even sure if I was human any more.

After some months, the eye of Sauron went away. (Its departure correlated with my first burst of vision therapy progress, but I can't tell if this is a cause and effect relationship.)  I also regained the ability to fantasize, so I luxuriated in my newly-regained imagination and stopped worrying about my phosphenes.

Then, a few weeks ago, my phosphenes came back.

And they're completely different!

Sometimes they consist of green figures that remind me of Chinese characters (I can't read Chinese so I couldn't tell you if they're actually Chinese characters, and it's not logistically possible for me to draw them. But wouldn't it be interesting if they said something in Chinese!)

Sometimes they consist of indescribable shapes and colours that are completely different from the indescribable shapes and colours I had previously.

A new and interesting feature is that occasionally a cartoon character will peek its head out from behind the swirling shapes and colours. I can't name any of the cartoon characters, but I have no idea if they're my brain's own creation or existing cartoon characters that my subconscious memory somehow internalized. (Again, it's not logistically possible to draw them, and I haven't been able to google my way to a "Yes! That's it!" moment of recognition.)

These new phosphenes are so interesting and different that I've put daydreaming/fantasy aside, and spend some time exploring them every night as I wait for sleep to overtake me.  I can't control them like I could the old ones (or, at least, I can't yet control them - I haven't a clue whether I'll eventually regain that ability), but I can sort of look around, zoom in, and generally watch the show.

But the most fascinating thing about Phosphenes 2.0 is that after I spend some time watching them, I get a false memory.

Example of a false memory: I was climbing up the side of a building. Partway through I thought "This doesn't seem safe - I shouldn't be able to hang onto the side of a building with just my fingertips." Then I thought "Don't be silly, you've done this thousands of times, people do it every day!"

Of course, I've never actually climbed the side of a building, and I'm not physically capable of hanging off a building by just my fingertips.  And people don't do it every day.

But, somehow, my brain served up that ridiculousness like a memory (as opposed to like a dream or a predream).

Ever since my phosphenes returned, this happens every night. The Phosphenes 2.0 Show, followed by a false memory, followed by the realization that the false memory is false, and then I promptly fall asleep.

It will be interesting to see how long my brain keeps this up for!