this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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I'm faceblind.
The way we identify people is simply by triangulating between their voice, their gait, their clothing, their habitual-things, their assoicates/pets/whomever, their locale, their immediate-context, their habitual-actions, etc.
The single most-terrifying social-situation I ever experienced, was meeting a friend in a context that was in a different locale, so I had no idea who this person was, whom I knew that I knew. They knew me, & I simply had no idea who they were, from where, or anything.
Had I met them in the right locale, then I'd have known who they were.
Force-rewiring one's brain is possible, but takes damn years of working on it..
( :
_ /\ _
( yes, that's my actual-face, above ; )
PS: yes, it is possible to identify some people by their spirit, which isn't material, so that gets added to the list above, too!
TIL I'm helping out by never changing my wardrobe.
Sidenote: I'm not face blind (I struggle with names instead), but I also sometimes struggle with recognizing people I only met once if I see them in a new context. Possibly because my brain doesn't fully commit people to memory unless I meet them at least twice. This is a problem, because people recognize me after meeting me once, and it makes for awkward second interactions.
Oh man I can't remember names for shit. I think I'm whatever the opposite of face blind is, like I remember people's faces forever after just seeing them once and can usually remember the context I saw them in days or weeks later even if I never interacted with them. I think this really colors how my memory of people works because I basically don't ever think about people's names in my head, I sort of refer to them by face, which probably doesn't make a lot of sense. It also means I pretty much always have to actively try to remember people's names, otherwise I'll hear it and immediately forget, like 2 seconds after someone tells me their name if I don't repeat it in my head I've already forgotten it. I've learned to mask both of these things because I find it's embarrassing to forget peoples names, especially someone I interact with a lot, and people are sometimes unsettled being remembered with clarity by a stranger.
I actually used to learn names by associating the face with the faces of other people I knew with the same name. In the area I lived at the time, it wasn't uncommon to know multiple people with the same given name, so this helped quite often. Now I live in an area where there is very little overlap, and my brain seems to have fully abandoned that approach, even when I meet someone sharing a name with someone I know.
Thankfully, hearing someone's given name often jolts my memory and I suddenly remember the full name. That's at least somewhat redeeming after the initial awkwardness.
Also face blind - I use voice as primary clue, not just pitch but intonation and vocalization patterns. I’m a big language nerd and a natural mimic, so vocal qualities stick out nicely for me and are often the only clue I need. After that I keep a list, basically, of feature descriptions that “are” a person, because oh joy, I also am aphantasic and can’t just pull up some reference image, even if individual features (possibly somewhat related in my case)
I get a LOT of false positive hits on sight alone, but with vocal cues I’m rarely mistaken.
Going missing in crowds because I don’t remember/know what the person is supposed to be wearing so I can’t recognize them on sight is the worst, and I’m short so I only see a few options at a time in a sea of people. It’s super un-fun. Fortunately by now everyone I know is fully aware that I don’t actually recognize them most of the time, and so they go looking for me.
The worst for me is when I see someone who flags all the descriptor traits for a person I haven’t seen in a while, and I don’t know if I actually know them or just have that feeling, so I feel compelled to talk to them to sort out why they feel familiar. It happens kinda a lot, especially with women who resemble my late mother, which is a uniquely uncomfortable feeling, so I don’t actually talk to those people knowing I’m probably wrong, but man that compulsion..