Your mind
In class I talked about thinking multiple thoughts at the same time. A few other students mentioned similar ways of thinking that I felt like I could identify with. We might be experiencing similar things but interpreting it completely differently. There's no way to ever know but there's comfort in that.
Generally speaking, I think I'm trying to keep it very flexible. If there's one thing I know I've been actively trying to do ever since I was a kid is to always leave room for doubt, to always question everything, and to consider different possibilities whenever I can. Of course many times I absolutely fail doing that, but I try to at least understand it in hindsight. And it's not like there's one right answer at the end of this, it's about acknowledging that there isn't.
I've always been against declaring myself as something, for the simple reason that I felt like it would limit me. For example if I told people I'm stubborn then I kind of have to commit to that notion, when in reality (whatever that is) I'm not always stubborn, or I don't want to be. I just don't find it helpful to define my personality as a set of characters. That said, I definitely do have my personal tendencies and preferences. I just try to keep it as flexible as I can and decide how to act and look on things on a case-by-case basis.
To answer some of the questions from the prompt — sure, thoughts can be distributed across a positive-negative spectrum but what good does it do? I try to see where these thoughts come from, and most importantly I try to always remind myself they're just thoughts. It's not that they're not real, they very much are real in the sense that they bear significance and interact and affect other thoughts and mechanisms (such as physiological ones), but surely they are not absolute truths and this fact should never be overlooked.
Am I the same person over time? That depends on what "being a person" means but my answer would be no. Experiences and our knowledge of the world around us accumulates; neurological paths are created, destroyed and strengthened; microbiome changes depending on our environment; all the cells in our body are essentially replaced every few years. Our consciousness supposedly remains intact but it grows and shifts and develops over time.
I think an illusion happens when what we think we know to be true, and what we sense to be true are in conflict. Neither of those is more "true" than the other, but I think illusions are significant in the way they're able to reveal our inner mechanisms, and in doing so I'd like to think we can use that have deeper connections with both our selves and others.
As for the making part, I connected all the moving parts and started with the example from class. I thought it would be fun to make it so the input is split into letters that appear in a random location on the screen, so that after a while the user could use their own input to construct new ways of reading it, almost somewhat like a weird meditative crossword.
I then realized the letters should be on a grid and not overlap with one another so I took care of that (I have copilot to thank here) and also added a ranging random font size. The positioning and everything kind of felt too random so I redid it in such a way that whole words are split and positioned randomly, rather than all the letters.
This way it's more legible but still has an element of unpredictability and leaves some room for different interpretations.
