Speaking of mind blowing... I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you've said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn't relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I become able to "see" even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I'm sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think "Ooh that's pretty." Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.
I thought that that's what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!
I don't mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I've only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You're saying that you can see anything you want... Excuse me because I'm going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.
But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I've always been good at "using my imagination"? I love reading fantasy novels and they're not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? I'm better than most people at geometry. Strange.
Interesting... I can't do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child's crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn't bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.
Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman's voice, but I can't hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren't speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying "Clang!"
I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.
This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.
(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)
Either you choose to persevere against the un-enjoyable-ness, or you don’t.
I find that often my hobbies don't make me feel "I look forward to doing this" before I start, or even "I am enjoying doing this" once I do. But they do make me feel "I'm happy that I did this" after I've made some progress.
(This is a very hard lesson for me to truly internalize.)
My favorite part of this is that the redistricting would have had no problems in court if the Republicans had simply not talked about their race-related motives in public.
With that said, I don't have high hopes for the Supreme Court here.
Bing used to be better than Google for a time but it has gotten worse too to the point where I use Google again. Edge is, IMO, unfairly maligned. It's a perfectly good browser, although Microsoft begging me to use it is quite annoying.
The curve for people who depend on the service seems wrong. I would expect a sharp drop as soon as the service goes out and then gradually a partial recovery as they find other things to do.
In the modern day, mostly because poor people live in undesirable areas and black people are more likely to be poor. Rich black people aren't living near chemical plants.
(Black people became more likely to be poor because of a long history of racism, but social mobility is sufficiently difficult for everyone that they aren't necessarily staying poor because of on-going racism. They would be living near to chemical plants disproportionately often for generations to come even if all racism disappeared today.)
My guess is that they're not particularly outrageous but embarrassing to both parties. Maybe the unreleased information is about Epstein's work with intelligence agencies, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans would want to release and individuals with access wouldn't feel a moral obligation to leak.
But that still doesn't explain why Trump doesn't just say so without revealing any details - it seems less damaging than total stonewalling.
Maybe they're like starfish, which mature from bilaterally symmetrical larvae into many-limbed adults?
Note how the adult starfish body starts out like an organ in the larva and then grows as the rest of the larva is absorbed.
Fun fact: vertebrates are descended from echinoderms - our ancestors were larvae that acquired the ability to reproduce without developing into adults. So if you're feeling like something is missing from your life but you don't know exactly what it is, consider the possibility that you subconsciously long to transform into your true adult form, which would look something like this:
So we're at the "I didn't do it, but if I did then it isn't so bad" stage.