pirogen

I've been using Firefox as my default and only web browser on Windows and Linux since it was called Firebird and Phoenix before that (or was it the other way around?). When Chrome first came out, Google's aggressive attempts at shoving it down my throat on what seemed like every single page of every single Google service, made the contrarian in me really, really not want to try it, and I never did. Never felt like I was missing anything, either.

By "drawing from imagination" I meant drawing without a reference (live or otherwise). You point seems to be: "drawing a very realistic rendition of an object/subject without looking at it is hard". Which is true, but completely orthogonal to my thesis that "drawing from imagination == drawing from memory".

On a tangential note: there's more to creating believable art than accurate re-creation of proportions and details (which is why sites like deviantart are full of completely lifeless art that immediately reads as copies of photos). I'm aphantastic and only a have a very general idea of what a bear looks like, but I'm pretty sure I could draw a move convincing one "from my head" than someone untrained spending all day at the zoo would, because I have a good knowledge (or memory, if you will) of dogs and cats musculoskeletal anatomy I can extrapolate from, and I understand how forms in space and light work.

I wasn't always aphantastic. I've already talked about it in another aphantasia thread here on HN, but when I was a child I was actually hyperphantastic: I would spend endless hours playing and directing vividly realistic (albeit silent) movies behind my closed eyelids. Sometimes (not always, but on a particularly good day), I was able to visualize things/creatures with my eyes open and have them interact with the real world.

If I wanted to see a rabbit, I didn't have to consciously recall facts about rabbit anatomy, behaviour and movement patterns like I would today (only to end up with most of them wrong); I just thought: "let there be rabbit" and with no effort at all there it was. Not a rabbit-like creature you would expect from a child's drawing, but an actual, realistic, anatomically correct rabbit hopping about the way rabbits do.

This ability started to gradually disappear around the time I went to school. I remember my frustration when I realized it was getting harder and harder to picture things and the quality of those pictures was getting lower and lower. Eventually I ended up not being able to visualize anything at all.

I've been wondering about this lost childhood superpower of mine for years, way before I even heard the term "aphantasia". When I say I'm aphantastic, I don't compare myself to some idea of how other people's minds work. I compare myself to what my own mind used to be capable of.

I'm aphantastic and I'm very good at drawing. I come from a family of academically trained artists and almost ended up becoming one myself, actually.

Drawing from imagination is actually drawing from memory. In my case, even though I'm unable to visualize the object I'm about to draw, I can recall facts about its features, then rely on spatial and analytical thinking to "reason about" their forms, proportions, perspective, light, shade etc. From there, the visualization process happens and gets refined directly on the paper/canvas.

I went from hyperphantasia as a child to complete aphantasia in my early teens. When I was <= 7 y.o. my favourite past time was playing and directing vividly realistic movies behind my closed eyelids. Sometimes I could even visualize things with my eyes open, creating a kind of "extended reality" with imagined things or creatures interacting with real ones. This ability started to gradually disappear around the time I went to school, and now I'm completely unable to visualize anything (other than occasional involuntary hypnagogues before falling asleep).

>he actually preferred working with record companies that had conservative, old, cigar-chomping executives

I think it's more of a general observation than his personal "preference". Zappa only worked with two record companies early in his career: MGM and Warner Bros., both of which he ended up in a bunch of legal battles with, so in mid-70's he started his own label (Zappa Records, then Barking Pumpkin Records) he exclusively released his music with.

"I prove to you that I am bad enough to get into hell, because I have been through it! I have seen it! It has happened to me! Remember: I was signed for Warner Brothers for eight fucking years!" -- FZ to the devil in "Baby Snakes" movie.

Is there any viable alternative to PayPal for a EU-based micro-business wanting to accept CC payments from North American customers?

I run a legally operating one-man business providing electronic services to customers (mostly other businesses) in EU, US and Canada. The EU customers pay me with bank transfers like civilized human beings, but Americans and Canadians always insist on PayPal because, apparently, North American banking system charges an arm and a leg for international bank transfers, so they'd rather pay with CC.

I didn't mind having to provide PayPal with scans of a bunch of sensitive documents. What I do mind is pretending my PayPal balance is not real money but virtual tokens with little legal protection and the possibility of being arbitrarily frozen for an undisclosed reason. That, and their horrendous fees (including currency conversions based on rates they pull out of the ass) for which they don't even provide anything resembling a legal invoice (a screenshot of an HTML table won't cut with my IRS).

Someone, for the love of God, tell me there's an alternative a teeny-tiny business like mine could use.