At a local bar they had a game machine, and if you got a high score on any of the games, your tab for the evening was free.
One of the games was a "spot the differences" between two pictures with an ever decreasing timer for each round. Using this trick I was able to easily surpass the high score, and garner a crowd watching me perform this mind numbing feat.
Probably my peak fame right there.
>Probably my peak fame right there.
My son and I always make jokes about everyone's 5 minutes of fame. Some random person on the jumbotron at a sporting event "Yup, there's his moment, it's over now."
At least yours got you something ;)
One of my dad's sayings when somebody in a film delivered a line and then disappeared was "6 months rehearsal for that."
I envision happy families watching the end credits for Dad's name as Third Assistant Caterer on a big budget film.
I now always stay around in the movie theater to see who the sysadmins were that worked on the film, for solidarity reasons. :-) Pretty much all the movies these days have them, which I would have never imagined would be the case back in the '80s when I started this career path.
And getting pissed off because Netflix minimizes it into the corner to already try to push some other show on you.
Couldn’t be worse then a YouTube short that has writing in the video but is covered by the subscribe button and some description of the video you wish were not there
Thank you for putting that image in my mind, it brought a smile to my face.
Best Boy Grip, the assistant to the Key Grip
The swordsman in Indiana Jones comes to mind.
The guy famously trained for months for the fight scene and a tired Harrison Ford just pulled out the gun and shot him. Everybody thought it was hilarious and that became the scene.
That is a very Dad thing to say.
You may or may not be aware that Andy Warhol famously quipped that, "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," back in the late 1960s. As media has gotten to be ever more ubiquitous and the cost of entry lower, he was clearly onto something decades before the internet!
And then there’s Banksy’s “in the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes“. For pretty much the same reasons you stated above, I assume.
To update this excellent quote to 2025, change minutes to seconds and you just described TikTok.
Yeah, I was thinking that the while modern social media has made the "cost of entry lower," and everyone can theoretically reach more people than ever, it's hard to even describe most of it as "fame" anymore. I mean, does content even "go viral" anymore, with users subdivided into the tiniest niche communities or audiences? Even if things get wider traction for a while, there's so much competition with so much other content that everything seems to get quickly drowned out and then can't even be found again later through search.
There’s a saying on twitter that every day there is a main character and the goal of twitter is to not be it.
Lol once I 3d printed my daughter a “Rocktopus”. It was a model of Dwane Johnson “the Rock” head with articulating octopus arms a cool 3d print that was funny. Anyways she took it and painted it all up and then glued on fake eye lashes and makeup on it. She then made a video to TikTok or snap I forget and it went viral getting like a million views. I could see that made her happy like a dopamine hit so told her that it was fun but to just be careful and that she is awesome and not to stress if random people on the internet don’t validate her feelings. She has me beat though I think my highest upvoted post was like 15k or so on reddit for something satirical and dumb. Feels good in the moment.
Totally indulging in this side discussion: I remember thinking in high school and college that fame was the end-all of life, telling people that my goal was to have my own Wikipedia page. I saw it as something like the combination of being a "cool kid" (but for, you know, the whole of society instead of just one's school) and a sort of immortality.
Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizing the obvious - how terribly shallow that is, and missing so much of what's really good in life - I've realized how fleeting fame seems to be even for the truly famous. Even looking over the list of US Presidents (never mind lesser political figures like VPs, cabinet members, congressmen, etc.) as someone who has always been interested in history, I look at some names and think, "who?" or "I've heard the name, but know nothing about him." I mean, of course you can still read about them, but that even a US President can be largely forgotten as a household name within 250 years is really a stunning thing to think about; they are ultimately no more immortal than someone who only has their name in a genealogy database or on a grave marker.
It’s a know phenomenon. A friend of mine had a reasonably important public office position. Always on the phone, constantly demanded, giving interviews, etc. The first few months after a change in administration were a great relief. A year after being let go and he was devastated. No one called, knew or cared who he was. There’s probably a name for this syndrome.
I think the desire for fame isn't an inherently bad thing.
> He was the man most gracious and fair-minded, > Kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
Those are the last lines of Beowulf. A man who won great fame among his people by slaying monsters and dragons. It's telling that the final line of the poem ends with his most dominant trait, "and keenest to win fame." Wanting fame is not wrong, and is far from shallow. The question is, "fame for what?" Regardless of whether you think Beowulf existed or not, it's telling that for a whole culture that the most important characteristic of a great man in one of their great poemsis "keenness to win fame," almost as a wink, with the bard saying "and if you want to be sung like this hero, you must desire fame just as keenly, and so do great deeds."
"True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it."
IMHO one should only desire to become Confucius level famous. The kind where you don't need validation to know you've done something interesting.
Length of remembrance aside, the idea of fame as immortality has always confused me on different grounds. It's not how fame works: we remember factoids, not people. It's a bit different if the fame is a work of art, but then the thing with immortality (sort of) is the art, not the person that made it. I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt, which are admittedly very cool and impressive things, but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.
This may be something I'm making up, but I have the feeling that the fame = immortality concept came out of legacy: people wanting to create a family that continues on after themselves (and is rich, powerful, etc). Which makes sense, because then we're talking about a logical extension of the reproductive instinct. But in the modern world even that seems unreachable to me: we're so utterly different from our grandparents that we might as well be aliens, and the same will probably hold true for our own grandchildren.
I guess all that puts me in the Mike Tyson school of thought on legacy: "We're just dead. We're dust. We're absolutely nothing."
You make good points. When I looked up the word "immortality" in Merriam Webster while writing my first comment, I found it interesting that one of the definitions was actually "lasting fame."
> we remember factoids... I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt... but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.
I've thought this before when looking at Wikipedia pages. Especially for less famous people with thin pages, they'll cite just a handful of news articles or press releases in which the person appeared. If there were a page like that for me, or the people that I know best, the collection of factoids would be a laughably inaccurate reflection of who we really are. Someone told me that it's important to write an autobiography for this reason.
My grandfather wrote a short autobiography, just for his immediate family. It's a really nice thing to have.
Except that if you become curious about, say, Benjamin Harrison you can go look up his Wikipedia page and I presume find one or more books about him. The person who is just listed somewhere such as a genealogy database is just a name, unless you choose to do an elaborate and expensive research project on them to figure out who they were and what they did.
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I can't overlap the images to save my life - they get like halfway there and that's it...
There is a way to help yourself.
Put the pair of images in front of your eyes.
Bring your finger between your face and the image.
Now look at your finger.
Move your finger back and forth.
While doing this, notice that at a particular distance, the images in background will perfectly overlap each other.
That's your moment.
Pull out your finger and look at that image.
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Should take lot less tries to learn doing it without finger. I have taught cross eye to my siblings and cousins using this method. But if you always need finger to focus it's fine.
I knew about this cross-eyed trick, I've tried it with a finger too, I just cannot do it. I've only ever succeeded in one "magic eye" picture in my life as well.
I have otherwise good vision, I can read small text from farther than most people (I didn't realize not everyone could read all the small letters on an eye test), I don't have a problem seeing things up close either, etc. but I lack the ability to properly cross my eyes for some reason.
It's too bad because I've spent a decent amount of time at bars with those spot the difference machines lol
When I was six, some older kid showed me this trick, but I could never really cross my eyes. These days, I wear glasses, so I guess no new superpowers for me.
Does it not work with glasses?
The finger trick did it for me. As mentioned elsewhere, I used to do this academically (looking at protein structures), but I couldn't easily get back in the groove here without the finger.
I tried, this, and I can get it to overlap in the background, but as soon as I take my finger away, I lose it.
I was having this problem as well, but I kept trying, and then I got it. I found the finger trick was useful to initially sort of calibrate the focal distance but overall didn't really help me that much.
Here is what worked for me. I used my laptop, zoomed in a bit on the images and brought the screen fairly close to my face. I ensured that the image was crisp using each eye (I also have astigmatism, and I probably also need reading glasses, but there is a sweet spot where both eyes have good focus, and I ensured I was there.) While crossing my eyes a bit, I start to see a third image in the center of the two images, but it's either out of focus (like two overlapping images), or it's very thin, like it's not the full image. I relax and keep my attention on this imperfect image and try to focus on it without trying too hard. Using this approach the image suddenly comes into focus and I no longer have to try to keep it there.
I feel like the key might be to notice the very beginning of the desired image in the center and then to try and focus on it, but in a bit of a relaxed way.
Incidentally when it works it is extremely weird! The other images essentially disappear and it's like you've travelled to another dimension.
You may have a very slightly 'lazy eye' (I do) - it can be a lot less extreme (not at all noticeable to others) than the pointing-completely-different-directions that people imagine, and iirc is highly correlated with astigmatism.
Optician used to tell me to work the muscle by following my finger to my nose, trying to maintain a single image. At a certain point it will snap into two - the 'lazy' eye has given up and drifted slightly - the goal is to get the finger as close as possible. Obviously if you get very close or all the way, that's 'cross-eyed', but I just can't do it.
Same, and I had no idea it was correlated with astigmatism! That does explain my prescription
I’m also unable to do this for whatever reason but using a stereoscope works.
It's like
https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedvie...
which some people struggle with, somebody posted a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
to HN yesterday which some people get and others don't. (That's different from the "cross-eyed stereogram" because one of them involves having two images and the other one has one image with two images hidden in it)
I can understand why it's hard for some. I've landed on that wiki page a while ago and couldn't figure it out. Then found a similar thing on an itch.io page that was easier for me to figure out.
In these later examples (starting with the easy puzzle of the OP, and your 3d examples), I find that I do the process in two stages.
Unfocus my sight until the third image shows up in the middle at the correct size (as a blurry mess). Then try to focus the center image.
What's more a lot of people (maybe 20%) don't benefit from things like
which is one reason why stereo movies have struggled. (That plus some people get sick... Having both a flat and 3-d movie in two different theaters comes across as money grubbing to the consumer but it is really a money sink to the theater.)
Yeah that's me. I lack stereoscopic vision so such tricks or 3d glasses etc do not work.
I have a big problem crossing my eyes too while having no problem with the parallel view way seeing stereograms. I am actually going to stop trying as my eyes started to hurt.
Which one makes things become bigger? I learned that one first and then later figured out the one that makes the mixed image smaller (cross eyed I think?). Now I cannot do the big one anymore.
For me, what's difficult is holding my right eye closed without my left eye drifting to look at my nose. My right eye's good, I can move it and focus on anything within my (now peripheral-limited) view... but the left is wonky. I think I learned how to wink (and hold it) with the right really early, by age 3 or 4, but the other side I never tried until I was pre-teen... some sort of muscle atrophy?
You can also tell if your head's level, just by crossing your eyes. If the two images are diagonal to each other, then your eyes/head aren't level. I have no idea what the possible use for that would be.
That was me at first.
I think the "cross eyed" phrase is a bit ambiguous.
What I ended up with (I think) is a focal point not closer than the screen but farther than it. My eyes didn't want to do it at first but then they did.
What is weird about it is the focusing and focal point are out of sync --- my brain can do it but the weird feeling is one of "gosh, this thing is a lot closer than it should be" where "should be" is based on focal point, and "is a lot closer" is based on focus.
Don't want to do this too much, feels like I could easily decalibrate my brain for real life lol.
That focus-farther-than-the-page works (for most people) as long as the distance between the (center of each of the) two images on the page is smaller than your interpupillary distance. In this case the left eye will see the left image, the right eye the right image, in the overlaid resolved image.
For most people, having the images resolve in front of the plane of the page such that in resolved overlaid image the right eye sees the left image, and the left eye sees the right image, will work ... and it can work even if the images are farther apart than the interpupillary distance.
Thanks, that is nicely explained --- you finished the thinking I had only started!
Are the eyes mechanically capable of pointing outward (so the interpupillary distance is not longer a constraint)? If so, is the problem then neurological not mechanical (brain doesn't want to send signal so they do that)?
Here's another trick: open the image in a browser, then zoom out. The smaller the image (up to a point and you can find a sweet spot) the easier it is to get them to overlap. Once you've got it, slowly zoom in a bit at a time, re-acquiring the overlap at each stage.
Same as in autostereogram, the trick is to look to the distance. Close your eyes and imagine a mountain far away or some distant object, notice how your eyes adjust to see it. Open your eyes and try to look at this imaginary mountain while the image is in front of you. When you see the third Image, treat it as if its a distant 3d object somewhere on the horizon.
When I brought an early autostereogram in to school in the early '90s my high school Physics teacher refused to try it as he thought it sounded impossible. He thought we were all in on it as we 'got it' one after another.
I spent far too much time as a twenty-something generating autostereograms, which seems to have trained my eyes. I was able to "cross" the images on this page very quickly.
NB autostereograms require you to move your eyes away from each other, the opposite of crossing them. To put it another way, crossing your eyes is what your eyes do when you're looking at something close to you, while the opposite is when you're looking far away.
Which is why for ASGs people advise you to look past the picture. Or why you bring the pic close to your eyes (so close that you basically have no choice but to look beyond the picture)
Ever since I was a child addicted to the "magic eye" stereogram books, I've always diverged (not crossed) my eyes for spot-the-difference puzzles.
Also, if you're doing it on a piece of paper, hold a pen in each hand spaced right so you see the middle (3rd) hand in the middle combined image, and move both hands in sync to circle all the differences. Kind of a cool way to point them out to someone else.
The difficult puzzle took me about 10 seconds here since I was looking for more than one difference. I saw the first difference in about 1 second.
You can easily generate inverted ones that require crossing your eyes to appear properly, but they don't look as nice since they pop out instead of going into the screen/book.
Is that the crossy-eye porn?
Better known as Magic Eye, but yes.
Don’t CROSS them. Relax them, like you’re tired and can’t focus on a computer screen.
You can actually do it both ways, but which is easiest for whom is different.
Also keep the size low. If you’re having a hard time at 20cm from a 4k 30” monitor, it won’t come easy. Zoom out.
Yep, I didn't need to fully cross them. Which is good, because that is painful.
There are two methods, either you cross them either you do like you’re describing.
It helps me to see the depth and then properly focus to cross them very slightly to start, then as I see the image my eyes adjust to pull it in focus properly.
What really helped me was doing some sessions with an Orthoptist to reeducate my eyes. I used to see double when stressed sometimes and could never imagine to converge/cross my eyes and retain focus. With the reeducation I was able to see the Impossible one in focus after a couple tries.
I had to see an eye doctor at the hospital when I was ~7 and I got to do some exercises, but I never learned to cross my eyes, and then it was like it probably wasn't very important since I did not have to go to the doctor again and no one mentioned it so I just went on with my life and it seems overall like not being able to cross my eyes is not a huge problem. But I guess it may be connected to my complete inability to see 3D effects or figure out how to see anything in the images in the article.
That happened to me too but I persisted and eventually succeeded. I think I needed to cross my eyes slightly more than I was initially. I have been diagnosed with a minor eye convergence issue which makes it difficult to focus on near field objects in motion -- gaining this superpower was difficult but I did it without a headache thankfully.
When it works you get what seems like 3 images with the middle one showing the differences; you can then relax and peruse the middle image at will. I guess all the practice with SIRDS as a child probably helps.
Treat it like a "Magic Eye" photo and just relax your eyes to a further focus point.
Same! I feel like I can get a fleeting moment and then it's gone. I swear I could cross my eyes when I was a kid - I wonder if with practice it'll come back or if I'm just old and this skill I didn't-know-I-wanted is lost
Are you crossing your eyes (focusing nearer than the object) or diverging them (focusing past it)? Diverging is a harder skill to learn.
My whole life I've been doing stereograms by diverging, but I couldn't get the three images in the post (the pairs would get closer but never fully overlap), so I tried crossing based on your comment. It was way easier than diverging (obviously, since I couldn't do it otherwise), but it took me a few tries, because I think it's actually /too/ easy to cross your eyes compared to diverging - I was way overshooting when I crossed my eyes. The trick was to notice this, and then control the un-crossing until they lined up.
Is diverging harder? I find it easier. Maybe it is from long ago practice on stereograms, but I'm curious if it could be due to neurological/physiological differences.
Crossing is easier because you can simply hold your finger in front of your eyes and look at that for practice.
Diverging requires you to look past the image, meaning you have nothing to really look at, which makes it difficult to figure out what your eyes are even supposed to do.
Those stereograms aren't helping much either, since they look like nothing until you get it right. With cross-eye you have instant double-vision that you just need to align.
Cross-eye also works across much larger distances, diverging fails when the images are too far apart.
Diverging is way way easier for me, but I am positive that's because of the 10's of hours (at least) that I spent staring at magic eye images as a child.
It depends on the image. If the two images are too far apart then it could require your eyes to diverge, and not to just converge slightly less. That might be impossible.
Diverging is definitely harder, and might be out of focus. To keep in focus I found it easier to focus on the right image and then cross my eyes, rather than staring in the center and then staring through the screen into the distance while trying to make them line up.
I used to not be able to do the "magic eye" 3d images until recently, and this trick is pretty handy.
Not even sure which one I should try :) but yes tried both to no avail. Maybe it's just not something to achieve in the first try...
For crossing just focus on your finger and then remove it.
Looking far away may be harder, and afaik it’s near impossible to look “past infinity”, iow pictures must be less wide than the distance between your eyes.
Btw these two methods aren’t equivalent in watching stereograms. If you look at one and see something but it doesn’t really make sense, then it’s probably the opposite chirality.
Personally I hate the crossing method because it makes your eyes feel strange for a while.
how I approached crossing: first practice just crossing your eyes and observing how every object has two images in this case and when you slowly “uncross”, they merge back into one. you can use anything in your surroundings.
then for the stereogram you do the same, observe the out of focus edges of the left and right pictures, then slowly uncross until left and right image occupy the same spot as though they were the same object. now its out of focus, but one (ok, actually three, because there were two, you “doubled” that by crossing, then merged two of them. but ignore the other two and focus on the merged pair)
sometimes you will merge images of the same picture, in this case you are just back at your normal vision, repeat :)
then you try to keep them overlapped and focus the vision, try to “believe” that you are really looking at a single object.
If you mean literally you can only bring them half way together, try just moving twice as far away.
Try on mobile, it's easier if the images are smaller.
Wow, yeah it happened immediately for me on mobile while I couldn't get past half way on my monitor. Thanks!
You might be too close to the screen.
Yeah, me either. My eyes really resist it. And after trying it a few times it messes up my focus for a bit.
Failed to perform the technique despite multiple retries, but didn't have any issues spotting differences the normal way for all except the impossible mode - which just felt like it would be tedious.
My usual method is just to brute-force linear scan from left to right, top-to-bottom. May not be elegant, but it works.
Took me about 10m total to get it all the way to impossible mode. I think you can do it!
Fun fact- when I was a teenager, my friends and I set up a stand in a local mall selling those “magic eye”posters. We made bank for a few months. But, there are actually a lot of people that medically cannot use the technique, or at least for whom it is extremely difficult or less vivid. Severe astigmatism, (obviously) blindness in one or more eyes, and certain attention deficits or fidgety types often have a difficult time.
I, on the other hand, 37 years later,am basically permanently crosseyed from the experience lol. It somehow became a resting state for me from all of the practice, so I’m always doing it on any kind of repetitive patterns, and even “successfully” on random ones which does some really weird stuff in your visual cortex.
How bad does your astigmatism have to be? I've only ever been able to get one magic eye poster to work for me in my life, and I had no idea astigmatism had any impact until just now! I don't know if mine counts as severe, but this would explain a lot for me.
As it happens, I also can't focus on the images in TFA after crossing my eyes to get the shimmer the author refers to.
...except as you say, it didn't work. The "eye-cross" trick gave the answer on the impossible one in ~10 seconds.
The impossible one was quite tricky, but I did find I was able to relax into the image and take my time. Probably took about 10 seconds.
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The impossible one was sub-2-seconds for me. I had to do it over to make sure it wasn't more than one difference...
Makes you wonder if the kid he was talking about had a lazy eye or crossed eyes or something.
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Sadly I was never able to gain anything from this trick other than my kids admiration. Often times kids menus at restaurants will have a spot the difference and I can see everything instantly doing this. Impressive to a kid but this girl in the video was obviously doing the same thing and does not impress me.
This is my peak fame as well. I had the high score on every one of these I've played using this method. My friends were always try to figure out how we could make money doing it...
The game is usually called 'Photo Hunt'
Those Megatouch systems run Linux! Lots of fun messages to read on the credits screen or when you reboot them.
I haven't seen one in several years, but they always used to run Red Hat, based on the boot screens.
I was about to post this same exact post :)
Was the high score holder on there for a few years.
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Just got a funny visual of someone going crosseyed and focused on overcoming a challenge in front of them, with a crowd of people cheering them on.
