Thinking about things that make you see the world around you differently: ARGs, birding, mushroom hunting, simulating physical phenomena in code, drawing.

I was listening to the Egglant podcast interview with the Animal Well maker and they mentioned "secrets in plain sight" in the game and compared it to ARGs, where your street becomes something new/different to you because there is a geocache (or pokemon station there).

That made me think about a tweet I saw yesterday from Jer Thorp about how birding helps you to see more details around you. Someone else mentioned taking up mushroom hunting had a similar effect.

I've thought about this when trying to simulate physical phenomena in code like water or raymarching, causes you to most closely observe the physical world.

A classic example of this is drawing, where one of the best instructions I got from the art teacher was that you had to look at something how it actually looks, not how you think it looks.

One of my favorite explorations of this idea is China Mieville's The City & the City, where two cities are overlaid on top of one another and living in one is a process of ignoring the other.